Once in every 200 years total paradigm shift takes place
in the world. Currently, a paradigm shift is taking place
from the industrial society to the knowledge society. Now
the modern economy is referred to as a knowledge economy
and the man in the modern business world is in continuous
search of wealth through knowledge. In today's competitive
business environment Knowledge Management (KM) plays a pivotal
role to tackle challenging situations that arise due to
various uncertain events. KM is about survival in today's
competitive business world. At the moment KM is emerging
as the most important function of Human Resource department
in every organization. HR department has a crucial role
to play in involving each individual in KM movement as a
key competency because talent management and KM are closely
interrelated.
Talent management focuses on individual level
like recruitment, selection, induction/ training, individual
skills and competencies development and career planning
but `knowledge management' will have focus on collective
level as how to influence the collective knowledge of the
enterprise through mentoring, collaborative team work and
knowledge sharing. To strengthen KM activities in organization
HR department needs to introduce a system of rewards and
recognition because "people do not do what you tell
them, but they do what you measure them for". To inculcate
learning skills and enthusiasm among the employees, leaders
have to reinforce their emphasis on training and performance
development to share and documenting knowledge and reuse
of others ideas for achieving organizational goals.
Knowledge management can be discussed in general as the
ability to create, communicate, and apply the knowledge
to achieve organizational (business) goals. From the HR
perspective the definition of KM is the process by which
the organization generates wealth from its intellectual
or knowledge-based assets (Butowitz and Ruth, 2000). It
explains that `people' must be the key resource of KM (Civic,
2000: Gooijer, 2000; Soliman and Spooner, 2000). According
to Garavan, 2000 and Armstrong, 2000—building knowledge
base and learning organization is the routine task of HRD.
KM is to understand the things through practice of `know-how',
i.e., through gathering of facts, rules and different procedures.
KM is to be found differently in different places and it
is a systematic leveraging of information and expertise.
In the US, KM process application is aggressive in Information
Technology sector than other sectors. In Europe the KM process
is managing intellectual capital in all knowledge organizations
and in Japan it is used for developing knowledge workers.
|
