Why Knowledge Management Is Important to the Success of Your Company

Article Review #5

Why Knowledge Management Is Important To The Success Of Your Company.

Anthony Nading Z-1549383 OMIS640-FT

2/11/2013

Description:

The article, Why Knowledge Management Is Important To The Success Of Your Company by Lisa Quast, stressed the importance of managing knowledge and how it could increase the chances of success for your company. When knowledge management is integrated into an organizations structure successfully, it can lead to competitive advantages and increased efficiencies throughout an organization's processes. Throughout organizations, managers and employees are constantly being bombarded with extremely large amounts of data every day, some of which is useful and some of which is not useful. This massive amount of data that managers have to process costs the organization time, money and can get in the way of managers attempting to develop "high-quality" decisions. This article gave one example of how the Corporate Executive Council(CEC) at General Electric put an knowledge management system in place to help executives cut though the noise, share information, and improve their overall decision making capabilities. This article also stressed the importance of making learning routine throughout the organization in order to build a "learning organization". Another reason knowledge management is important is because managing organizational knowledge can stimulate cultural change and drive innovation for any business regardless of size.

Importance to the Management of IT Systems:

One quote from this article I feel does a great job explaining why knowledge management is important to managing IT systems, is when David Derbyshire said; "Scientists have worked out exactly how much data is sent to a typical person in the course of a year- the equivalent of every person in the world reading 174 newspapers every single day"(Derbyshire,2011, pg.1) This vast amount of data people encounter every day is what make knowledge management more important than ever. This article also categorized three important reasons why managing knowledge (knowledge management) is critical to a company's success, which are; 1. Facilitates Decision Making Capabilities, 2. Builds Learning Organizations, and 3. Stimulates Innovation and Cultural Change.

Information overload and the need of information from various parts of the company can severely restrict manager's decision-making capabilities, by implementing a knowledge management system can and will facilitate better, more informed decisions from managers. The second reason knowledge management is important to IT systems is because it builds "learning organizations" by making learning routine, which creates a culture where everyone continuously assesses themselves, peers, their departments, and their entire organization looking for any ways to improve current processes. For example, the U.S Army's After Action Reviews (AAR's) is a product