7 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

applied information. Both forms of knowledge are important for organizational
effectiveness. It is found that the strongest contribution to current Knowledge
Management solutions is made by technologies that deal largely with explicit knowledge.
Contribution to the formation and communication of tacit knowledge and support for
making it explicit are currently weak, though some encouraging developments like
communities of practice(CoP) are discussed. Hence the initial focus will be on KM
solutions based on explicit knowledge and subsequently on tacit knowledge
2. Knowledge Management
In the strict sense the term ‘Knowledge Management’ is a contradiction, since knowledge
is not a tangible thing which can be managed. However Knowledge Management is
increasingly seen, as signaling the development of a more organic and holistic way of
understanding and exploiting the role of knowledge in the processes of managing and
doing work, and an authentic guide for individuals and organizations in coping with the
increasingly complex and shifting environment of the modern economy. The essence of
Knowledge Management is that it creates and nurtures the environment that enables
knowledge to grow, flow and create value in the organization. Hence Knowledge
Management manages the enabling environment and not the knowledge.
For the purpose of this paper, Knowledge Management (KM) can be considered as an
umbrella term for a variety of loosely related practices, programs, and technologies
associated with leveraging the “knowledge” of organizations for greater performance or
competitive advantage. Knowledge Management has to be implemented as an
organizational discipline, where the process of capturing an Organization’s collective
expertise, wherever it resides – in databases, in paper or in people’s heads – and
distributing it to wherever it can produce maximum pay of, is institutionalized.
Knowledge Management creates the necessary environment in the organization for people
to create, leverage & share knowledge so that the organization gets the greatest value
from the collective knowledge available to it. “Knowledge” in this context includes both
the experience, emotions, values, hunches and understanding of the people in the
organization, and the information artifacts, such as documents and reports, available
within the organization and in the world outside. According to Peter Drucker, knowledge
has become the resource, rather than a resource. "The central wealth-creating activities
will be neither the allocation of capital to productive uses nor "labour". Value is created in
the organization by "productivity" and "innovation", through applications of knowledge to
work. Effective Knowledge Management typically requires an appropriate combination of
organizational, social, and managerial initiatives along with, in many cases, deployment of
appropriate technology; a synergistic combination of creativity, innovation of human
beings with advanced capabilities of information technology. Successful KM
implementation demands deep rooted behavioral & strategic change and hence requires
the top management initiative and involvement. It also needs the involvement of everyone
in the organization. Only then the organization can be viewed as a living organism capable
of creating continuous innovation in a self organizing manner.
The central tenet of Knowledge Management is to raise the effectiveness, speed and
quality of learning, decision making and customer service at the level of the organization
and individual. By institutionalizing best practices existing in organizational pockets,
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