Organization Management - Essay Example

Knowledge management as a practice emerged at the beginning of the 1990s and, to a certain extent, is considered as still in its infancy. According to Bounfour (2003) "KM can be defined as a set of procedures, infrastructures, technical and managerial tools, designed towards creating, circulating (sharing) and leveraging information and knowledge within and around organizations". (Bounfour, 2003, p. 156) Therefore, from this perspective, KM involves several dimensions: individual, group, organisation and networks of organizations.

KM which often consists of communities can be conceptualized as groups or organizations whose primary purpose is the development and promulgation of collective knowledge. Knowledge communities are a prevalent and increasingly important form of contemporary organization. For example, all of the major social sciences are organized as knowledge communities consisting of numerous researchers whose common goal is the advancement of knowledge within their discipline (Porter, 1995). Within such communities, knowledge is typically disseminated through a variety of mechanisms.

These include formal routines and procedures, such as publication of original research in scholarly journals and presentation of work-in-progress at academic conferences. Knowledge is also disseminated through various informal mechanisms, such as circulation of unpublished manuscripts and the exchange of preliminary ideas and data through electronic mail. Whether formal or informal, such mechanisms are intended to facilitate the steady accumulation, integration, and rapid diffusion of emerging insights and innovations within the community.

(Levine et al, 1999, p. 164) There are two types of mobilizable knowledge within an organization: Knowledge which is assimilatable to pure information, i.e. a stock of items, having a relatively weak combinatory potential, in particular in terms of innovation: commercial information on current customers, information on the priority sectors, information on the firm. Knowledge having, on the contrary, a high combinatory potential both inside and outside the firm: such is the case, in particular, for the best practices and grey literature, whose vocation is to affirm the potentially developable added value by the company.

Being furtive by nature, best practices can be combined with other best practices to produce better 'new best practices'. The same applies to the grey literature; whose vocation is to affirm the definitely distinctive character of the company's supply. The publics targeted by the use and production of this knowledge can, to a certain extent, be differentiated. Thus information of a commercial nature is addressed initially to the players in a situation of sale or in a first approach to selling services.

On the other hand, the grey literature concerns initially 'the intellectuals', i.e. those in charge of the development of new activities. (Bounfour, 2003, p. 164)How organizations learn In order to gain access to the learning of organizations, we have to dig history a bit. It started when classic bureaucratic organizations started to link learning to professionalization. Therefore researchers like Swieringa and Wierdsma (Swieringa and Wierdsma, 1992, p. 140) argued that the learning organization concept may be a