The Complete Guide to Knowledge Management: A Strategic Plan to Leverage Your Company's Intellectual Capital

Chapter 1. The Motivation toward Knowledge Management: Combining the Tactical with the Strategic

In this chapter you will:

Review examples of typical tactical knowledge management problems.

Discover how knowledge management is actually a strategic tool aiming to increase the intellectual capital essential for long-term success of an organization.

Learn that the manager should lead knowledge management efforts in an organization because of its importance as a procedural tool with both tactical and strategic relevance to success.

Most managers, when they begin this journey into knowledge management (KM), do not even know what knowledge management entails. They are only familiar with some of its problems from their day-to-day experience with the flow of knowledge in their organization. These day-to-day experiences are considered tactical, meaning they interfere with an organization's efficiency and performance. An example of a tactical issue might be that a manager notices a worker or colleague is not open to sharing his position's knowledge, so the manager needs to reinvent processes that already exist.

Later, when managers become more involved in learning about successful knowledge management, they realize the tactical problems also have strategic implications and solutions that can further the intellectual capital of their organization overall. For instance, modern high-tech organizations use KM to align their research and development (R&D) efforts. Or traditional industries realize ...