Knowledge management (KM) as a formal discipline has been widely adopted and practised by several organisations over the years. In the early days of KM being implemented in the organisations,

explicit knowledge or structured knowledge, that is, knowledge as practised through processes and documentation around them was given a lot of importance. As

organisations grew and their processes matured, more and more explicit knowledge got shared and improved upon from time to time for the common good of the organisation.

The realisation that implicit knowledge, that is, knowledge that is accumulated from experience and incidents has value, came next. It has come to be recognised that is important to capture such knowledge in order to ensure continuity of functioning of the organisation and to minimise the dependence on

individuals or their memories to handle different scenarios. Arising out of the complexities of capturing implicit knowledge and making it feasible for others to imbibe and practise, came the necessity to have methods to convert implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge. This is indeed the most challenging dimension of knowledge management and when organisations master this art, they embark on the journey of excellence?consistently meeting or surpassing the expectations of the customers.

How do organisations capture implicit knowledge in the first place? Firstly it is important for organisations to decide which are the elements of knowledge that are unique and critical to the business growth and survival. In process industries, if the production process is considered to be unique, the knowledge inherited by the employees over the years is considered critical and such knowledge is recorded through portraying scenarios and incidents and describing how they would be dealt with. If the differentiation for a business lies in the customer relationship process, such practical knowledge related to handling of customers needs to be captured and made available for the customer agents and others to relate to.

FMCG products, telecom services, banking and financial services are some of the examples that may belong to this category. For all businesses which are born out of information technology, the essence of success lies in their ability to unearth the implicit knowledge at every stage of their business delivery process, in their capability to access it, as and when required and in their uniqueness to interpret such knowledge to be able to innovate new offerings. Thus the future of businesses would lie in the mastery of implicit knowledge and making this art, a science?to enable various layers of the organisation to have templates to capture such knowledge and to be able to serve such knowledge to those who need it at the time, in the form and shape they need.

In the past, the boundary of knowledge creation was restricted to the organisation and particularly to those employees who were associated to the specific areas. However, with dynamics of information technology and the internet at play, the boundary of knowledge creation has radically changed. For instance, businesses are throwing up queries related to problems to be solved to the collaborative platforms created for interactions of employees through their intranet. Thus they are able to reach out to several employees who may have a direct or an indirect association with the problem being discussed and share their views/experiences thus contributing to the new knowledge creation process and expanding the boundaries of knowledge of the organisation.

Design and development of products/components is no longer restricted to the R&D function of the business unit. A healthy collaborative environment extends the reach of the designers to key customers/vendors and after sales providers enabling them to collect vital inputs at every stage of design and thus make the ffering relevant and increase the probability of success of the product. The new boundary of knowledge extending to various stakeholders not only enables the business unit to enhance the success rate of its velopment, it also brings down the time and cost of go to market plan and at the same time opens up new vistas for the

stakeholders, hitherto not

available in advance.

The direct connects of the businesses with their customers because of the various touch points such as the mobile and

social media is another interesting zone that acts as an important source of implicit knowledge related to the product and customer buying behaviour. While in the past such insights were possible to be harnessed primarily through formal market research studies or focus group sessions, with the deployment of powerful tools, analytics of the plethora of data makes it feasible to derive the much valued understanding of customer buying behaviour and experience. Hence it would be advantageous to integrate the capabilities of big data, business analytics and business intelligence with other traditional sources of knowledge and

expand the frontiers of knowledge management.

In the early days of KM, the

focus was to encourage people to share knowledge whereas in the current phase because of

increased engagement through technology tools of different kinds, the willingness and the ease of sharing knowledge and information has increased dramatically. With the boundaries of knowledge getting redefined, there are other important dimensions in the management of knowledge that have to be critically examined. For instance, with new knowledge getting created on collaborative platforms, the ownership, reuse, repurpose and distribution of such assets have to be thought through.

Arising out of the extended communities of knowledge creators, if new offerings are created, the IP rights of such offerings could also become a complex question. Thus we are beginning to experience a new phase in the domain of KM?on the one hand, it would have close linkages with IP protection, new product development and security and on the other, KM can become a strategic force that could open up new vistas for the business and bring about a game changing impact on the organisation.

The writer is CEO, Global Talent Track, a corporate training solutions company