Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management

Have you ever stopped to think about the amount of information that is generated daily in a company? All processes performed in an organization are sources of information necessary for the proper functioning of the business and thus, guarantee the competitiveness of the company.
But… What to do with all this information? How to organize it? How to keep it easily accessible for everyone? For this, we use Knowledge Management, which is based on collaboration between people, sharing of best practices, documentation and process standardization

Definition

Knowledge Management (KM) is the systematic process of documenting, storing, communicate and apply all this knowledge to the many processes in your organization. It can be defined, in its broadest sense, as the process of creating, sharing, using, and manage the knowledge of an organization.
KM is nothing more than making the right information available to the right people. Its about ensuring that everything the company needs to operate is documented and capable of training, so that the processes carried out in the organization are not only in the heads of the people responsible for the processes. It is necessary to standardize them so, through training, other people can perform that particular process.

Objective

Knowledge Management has some main objectives, they are:
● Capture information through documentation;
● Make information and processes accessible;
● Share process best practices, helping to find improvements;
● Facilitate training;
● Encourage the generation of knowledge;
● Increase the organization's competitiveness by valuing its assets
intangibles.

Pillars

We can define three pillars that support Knowledge Management:
● Processes: it is through processes that people obtain the information they need, when
they need to.
● People: the creation, dissemination and use of knowledge is done by people,
because knowledge is in people, is created by people, is used by people.
● Technology: helps connect the people, information and data they need.

Knowledge Management x Process Management

Processes play a very important role in organizations, they are a structured way of recording knowledge, being, therefore, the most effective way to obtain a product. It is important to note that processes and knowledge flow cannot be separated, as knowledge is present throughout the process flow. Today, the ability to create and use knowledge is a way to ensure the competitive advantage of an organization. The frequent changes in the market force companies to increasingly use knowledge to add value to their products and services. It is essential, then, that knowledge be managed like any other capital within the
organization.
When carrying out the mapping and registration of the processes, part of the knowledge of the work, which is contained in the experience of the employees who perform it, is recorded and encoded. Thus, the registration of processes enables the dissemination of knowledge, accelerating learning, facilitating training and understanding, minimizing your loss with the departure of employees.
By combining knowledge management and process management, we are able to take advantage of all the knowledge available in the organization, in addition to achieving more results (leveraging the productivity) and at the same time improve processes and organizational learning (since everything is documented). With this combined usage, it becomes easier to share better process practices (helping to find improvements) and greatly facilitates the training of employees.
The Knowledge Management process goes through four stages:
● Capture: registration and codification of knowledge;
● Mobilization: sharing and dissemination.
● Application of knowledge: using knowledge to gain competitive
advantage.
● Innovation: creation and renewal of knowledge.
In view of everything that has been said in this article, with Knowledge Management we can generate different results. Among them, the most relevant are: greater agility in management, greater effectiveness in decision making, gain of competitive advantage, ease in predicting difficulty and making it possible to avoid them and the ability to detect opportunities and approve them.