Categories and Use of Knowledge
Knowledge can be placed into four broad categories:
| Planning: | knowledge necessary for planning know what: how should we be doing this? |
| System: | knowledge necessary to understanding the
“cause and effect” of value creation in the firm know why: what will be the impact of doing this? |
| Market/Customer: | knowledge necessary to channel value to
customers know who: who are the customers for this, what are they like? |
| Process: | knowledge necessary to perform know how: how do we do this? (including the tacit skills of the master craftsman) |
Use of Knowledge
One of the critical element of KM is the capacity to transform knowledge into effective and sustainable know-how. Otherwise, we have little use for the type of knowledge which is gathering dust in University libraries.
Knowing is fine, but the purpose of managing knowledge is to achieve results, as a consequence KM must include know-how, whether explicit knowledge, intelligence or appropriate technology.
Knowledge management is a way of doing business.