7 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

to respond to these changes with new coping mechanisms, with dynamism and
effectiveness. This is true for individuals, for communities and for organizations. While
the enormous changes in information technology has thrown up immense possibilities and
opportunities, there are enormous gaps in the access, control and utilisation of technology,
information and knowledge. And these gaps divide countries, regions, different sections of
society, and even people within an organization.
While it is easier to minimize the technological gap, bigger challenge lies in bringing
about changes in attitudes and values, changes in the ways of working and
communicating, and changes in the entire framework of relationships and processes --
among people, within organizations, and in the interface with the socio-economic
environment, which is necessary to cope with the rapid changes. More and more
organizations are turning to Knowledge Management, to address these challenges.
Today, a range of technologies like computers, internet, groupware, information
warehouse, video-conferencing etc. offer unprecedented opportunities to disseminate
information, know-how and insights rapidly and cheaply to a worldwide audience. The
reach of information, know-how and experience possessed by individuals can be greatly
extended once it is captured and explicated so that others can easily find it and understand
and use it. Knowledge may be explicitly available in the form of reports of activities,
minutes of meetings, memoranda, proceedings of conferences, other documents or
databases, audio and video recordings, multimedia presentations or implicitly as the
experience, emotions, values, hunches and understanding of the people in the organization.
Many factors have transformed the way in which organizations now view knowledge, but
perhaps the pivotal development has been the dramatically extended reach of know-how
through new information technology. Rapidly falling costs of communications and
computing and the extraordinary growth and accessibility of the World Wide Web present
new opportunities for knowledge-based organizations, to share knowledge more widely
and cheaply than ever before. Nevertheless, even with modern tools, the process of
knowledge transfer is inherently difficult, since those who have knowledge may not be
conscious of what they know or how significant it is. Thus the know-how is sticky and
tends to stay in people’s heads. The diverse efforts of organizations around the world to
share knowledge are being pursued under various labels, including Knowledge
Management , Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Focus, Knowledge
Creation, Organizational Learning, Intellectual Capital Management, Intellectual Asset
Management etc. There is no agreed definition of Knowledge Management , even among
practitioners. The term is used loosely to refer to a broad collection of organizational
practices and approaches related to generating, capturing, disseminating know-how and
other content relevant to the organization’s activities, and the enabling organizational
culture.
Knowledge is basically classified in to ‘tacit’ and ‘explicit’. Tacit knowledge resides in
the heads of people and explicit knowledge is available in paper, computer etc. Tacit
knowledge is what the knower knows, which is derived from experience and embodies
beliefs and values. Tacit knowledge is actionable knowledge, and therefore the most
valuable. Furthermore, tacit knowledge is the most important basis for the generation of
new knowledge. The key to knowledge creation lies in the mobilization and conversion of
tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is represented by some artifact, such as a document
or a video, which has typically been created with the goal of communicating with another
person. Explicit knowledge is information which can be used for problem solving. It is
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