For years and years craftsmen have taught their trade to apprentices, family business owners have passed on commercial know-how to their children and workers have exchanged ideas and to-dos on jobs. So sharing of knowledge has been prevalent since times before but only recently has this phenomenon gained importance since industrialized economies have shifted from natural resources to intellectual assets. Thus, giving rise to the new concept of Knowledge Management.
Knowledge Management is the process of creating or acquiring, storing and sharing knowledge and expertise to enrich the techniques and operations in an organization and enhance learning and performance.
Knowledge has now become the key resource for competitive advantage and is as much concerned with people as it is with information technology because information systems act like ‘stocks’ of encoded knowledge while people provide the ‘flow’ of knowledge from one another or to a knowledge database. They are important means of acquiring, exchanging and disseminating knowledge.
Hence the role of HR comes into play as the ability to deploy different types of knowledge to issues of organizational design, employment security and career patterns has to be implemented with appropriate people mangement.
