Knowledge Management

Introduction The business world at large has embraced the old adage that says knowledge is power, and this is reflected in the way organisations now view knowledge. Knowledge has become one of the key resources organisations utilise in their business strategies hence the need to manage it. The field of Knowledge Management is considered fairly new and it has generated a lot of interest within the business circles with individual companies investing a lot of resources in its development and establishment within their organisations. This paper is focusing on the description and evaluation of the linkages between knowledge management and business strategy with the use of examples from my company, Thermal Air Conditioning (Private) Limited thereafter referred to as Thermal. The definitions of the two terms, knowledge management and business strategy will give a background which will be followed by the descriptive and evaluative component of this discussion.

Knowledge Management Knowledge Management, according to Levinson, M., (1998) is the process through which organisations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge based assets. More often, generating value from such assets involves codifying what employees, partners and customers know, and sharing that information among employees and departments. Another school of thought views knowledge management as comprising a range of strategies and practises used in an organisation to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embedded in individuals or embedded in organisations as processes. A similarly broad definition is presented by Davenport, T. and Prusak, L., (2000), which states that knowledge management is managing the corporation’s knowledge through a systematically organisationally specified process of acquiring, organising, sustaining, applying, sharing and renewing both the tacit and explicit

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