Company or Organization May Reach Its Potential

¶ … company or organization may reach its potential it must first understand the availability of all its capabilities and weaknesses. When organizations maximize their potential, this appears only after they have a full understanding of not only the market, but of its own internal interpretive mechanisms that help dictate the strength and pace of its operations. In today's world, knowledge management has emerged as an instrument to assist in those responsible for developing adequate systems for these types of work relations. Leadership at all levels within the company are responsible for implementing the proper system in order to facilitate current tasks and challenges and knowledge management is connected to every single decision in some way or the other. The purpose of this essay is to examine an implications of knowledge management for my organization. I will compare and contrast knowledge management to other important terms that help define it and contrast it while highlighting advantages and disadvantages within the concept itself in order to realize its effectiveness and at what level it can be effective.

Defining terms is essential for any communication event. Knowledge management requires an understanding of the subtle differences between three terms: data, information and knowledge. Distinguishing between these three abstractions will help not only the systems manager but also the leadership teams in disseminating and helping others within the organization understand this important concept in order to maximize the efficiency of the group. Wilson (2002) concluded that knowledge management is generally a misunderstood term in the realm of consulting practices. He noted that nonsensical and incongruent language arose in many situations due to the fact of not properly defining the words being used within the system itself. Confusing the terms data, information and knowledge becomes the error that leads to the misappropriation of resources and energy that does not maintain competitive edge for any company wishing to do so.

Li & Song (2009) attempted to bring clarity to the issue by providing baseline definitions for these terms and how they relate to one another. According to this pair, knowledge management is defined as "the name given to the set of systematic and recommended actions that organization can take to attain the maximum value from the knowledge available to it ." Knowledge management is nothing more than a system of thinking and doing that incorporates data information in a way that rhetorically expresses the importance of the argument without confusing the reader with primary and inconclusive distorted verbiage. Data is nothing more than a symbolic representation of an abstract idea. Data that has the possibility of evolving into information within the contrasting and contextualizing circumstances and the environment give this data some purpose and relevance to the present time. That will evolve into information and then only when information becomes relevant to the individual processing it does it become knowledge.

Knowledge is based upon human interpretation of environmental factors. Managing this knowledge is more sublime and subtle than data or information management due to the fact of its human constituency. The relativeness of any opinion or idea is expressed in the concept of knowledge management and how the general consensus of any organization incorporates this relative knowledge into his organization will determine success or failure of knowledge management. In the past, organizations after acquiring large amounts of data information were left without a next effective step within their processes due to the fact that they misunderstood the idea of knowledge being incorporated within an individual human understanding.

Bogorad (2010) encourages systems managers and information managers to avoid being extremely reliant on technology and the temptations of its distractive qualities when beginning to implement knowledge management systems and methods into an organization. He introduced key points that should be incorporated within this idea from any type of system in order to achieve knowledge management understanding. Social aspects, classification, trust and strong leadership are important aspects according to this analysis. When these key facts are interwoven and operating at a synergetic level, knowledge management becomes a realistic and advantageous idea that companies can utilize within their day-to-day operations and maximize their potential. Once again the inflection of human understanding seems to appear paramount to data information. The human mind cannot ignore this if knowledge management wishes to be fully understood by those who attempt to realize its benefits.