KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management

Introduction

In today's organisations, whether private or public, the proper and optimal use of information and knowledge is essential in achieving the objectives for success. No doubt, organisations need to pay greater attention to the intangible assets of the organisation, especially those capable of providing economic value to the company (Dalkir & Liebowitz, 2011). In this context, knowledge has become one of the most important assets for organisations, because it creates wealth management or added values that facilitate reaching an advantageous position in the market. Similarly, the role of communication cannot be avoided as it plays a significant role in performance, productivity and success (Serenko et al., 2010). In fact, most of multinational organisations invest enough on communication process as they believe that effective communication not only conveys a clear organisational vision and mission to employees but also ensures correct transmission of messages at all levels in/outside the organisational boundaries (Rowley & Hartley, 2010).

However, managing communication, information and knowledge has been challenging for many organisations. It can be seen in some organisations that diversity becomes obstacle in effective management of communication, while poor management of Information Technology reduces the quality of message delivery as well as pace of knowledge creation (Miller, 2012). This paper aims to discuss the role of communication, information and knowledge at AstraZeneca. However, in order to have better understanding of the topic, it is essential to discuss about information, knowledge and communication.

Discussion

Data, information and knowledge are the basic concept in knowledge management that can be explained as (Melkas & Harmaakorpi, 2008):

Data is a collection of data recorded on certain media, in a form suitable for permanent storage, transmission and processing. Convertible and can be processed to obtain information.

Information is the result of the conversion and analysis. Unlike the data, information is fixed data about events and phenomena, which are stored in certain media as a result of data processing for specific tasks. For example, the database contains various data, for a given query a database management system provides the required information (Gao et al., 2008).

Knowledge is recorded and proven practices processed information that was used, and can be re-used for decision making.

Knowledge is a resource that is becoming a field with enormous potential to change the world because of the progress of the new information technologies (Kebede, 2010). In the economic environment in which we find ourselves, knowledge is an essential element in the information economy and involves the creation of tools for proper management of this knowledge. Knowledge is the kind of information that is stored in the knowledge base and displays knowledge of a specialist in a particular domain. In fact, knowledge is an intellectual capital for any organisation (Choo & Bontis, 2002). In addition, the knowledge can be divided into two main categories, tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge.

Tacit knowledge is often described as what we know but cannot explain. For example, how to: identify critical competitive intelligence, negotiate with client. Tacit knowledge resides in the heads of the employees and is ...