Business has always needed knowledge. There is now a growing trend that encourages business to consider knowledge explicitly as part of the organisational resource structure. With this change to a more explicit view of organisational knowledge has come recognition of the need to manage knowledge.
This subject has a lot of maturing still to do and is littered with unhelpful claims and statements. The fundamental problem is that knowledge is part of almost everything in business and some have difficulty in knowing where boundaries lie during discussion and even project development. A project to sort out the company knowledge resource can be a project about everything if objectivity and understanding are not employed. It is however, important to know about issues that relate more directly to the knowledge resource and probably deal with these in parallel or in advance.The AKRI approach to building a management level understanding of the organisational knowledge resource is called Structural Knowledge Mapping. This is a technique that has already proven very successful in both large and small organisations and across a very broad range of knowledge sectors.
In order to correctly quantify an organisational knowledge resource it is first necessary to address the more difficult question of "What is knowledge?". If this is not done then almost everything can be assumed to be in some way part of the knowledge resource.
Many organisations include documents and records as part of a knowledge resource. However, for all but the least useful definitions for knowledge, these things are really part of the information or data systems an organisation may maintain.
Using some of the more constrained definitions for knowledge the extent of the knowledge resource can be known and managed more precisely. For most organisations, much of its actual knowledge resource will be contained within the heads of its staff. In such cases, the truth value and justification for this can be estimated from the degree of expertise of the individuals. Some of the knowledge resource may be held in computer systems. In such cases, the truth value and justification for this knowledge may be contained in the records created when the system was developed and tested.
The exhibit named "What is Knowledge?" can help organisations to focus more carefully on their actual knowledge resource.
A knowledge resource may contain as much that is reason and justification as it does knowledge. The organisation would also have to decide on what is reasonable justification and in what time frame and under what conditions truth was declared.
So each entry in the knowledge base must also contain a context in which the knowledge is valid. This context may refer to a time period, an environmental situation, or an activity for instance.
The process by which a company values its knowledge resource and seeks to manage it effectively within the main stream of company activity.
There are a number of elements that are required in order to help an organisation take control of its knowledge resource.
A structural audit helps organisations to:
