Managing
knowledge productively and innovatively has become
the clarion call of all expert groups who wish to
retain their relevance and maintain their competitive
advantage
in a fast changing world. To the academia KM’s
significance lies in the development of the corpuses
of knowledge: to the systems developers KM is about
the effective delivery and sharing of knowledge :
to librarians it is about the organization and dissemination
of knowledge and its resources and to the business
world it is about staying ahead of competition using
knowledge as the key asset.
Notwithstanding the variety of definitions and interpretations of KM by different
expert groups, there are however, certain basic issues that have continually
been debated --- Is KM just a concept? Has implementation of KM been a success
or a failure? What are the real benefits of KM? What are the common problems
found in the implementation of KM? Are there common issues in the implementation
of KM that cut across companies, organizations, and interest groups?
How is application of knowledge crucial to competitive business interest? What
is the relationship between knowledge acquisition and company profits/ROI/benefits?
How does one cope with changes in knowledge development? Is KM only about the
cognitive? Are creativity and innovation part of KM? Is it true that KM is ultimately
about people, processes, and products? While the issues above have been highlighted,
there are many more that need to be discussed and further investigated. And what
better way to do this than to gather all interest groups in a conference to not
only debate the issues but to find solutions in the implementation of KM through
the sharing of information and experiences. In this way, we can finally move
KM out of its conceptual mode into the implementation mode. |
