The Purpose of Knowledge Management in an Organization and Improving Productivity - Literature review Example

The role of KM has become far more important due to the constantly changing economic situations. “Due to the rapidly changing global economy businesses need to consider a serious change in strategy and begin to focus more on knowledge management even at the mundane line levels.” (Switzer 2008, p.19). This is quite applicable to the Telecom sector as well, because many telecom companies, irrespective of whether they are multinational or domestic ones, are being impacted by the economic downturn.

With the global economic changes particularly the financial crisis leading to high attrition rate, it is crucial on the part of the organization to retain the key knowledge assets of employees and their skill and experience, through effective KM system. As mentioned above, in an organisational context, knowledge encompasses not only information in a paper or in a computer database, but knowledge and the resultant skill and experience that is imbibed in an employee. Apart from the ingrained knowledge of the employees, work knowledge will be developed among the workers by the organisation through a series of training programs, practical experiences, etc.

As stated by Siong and Chung (2008, p.4) ‘Knowledge workers are assets that companies have invested time and money to recruit and train”, with the being knowledge acquired by these “workers through training, on the job exposure and interactions with industry players”. Thus, the organization has to effectively manage without losing those assets to others particularly their rivals.