One of my uni mates asked what course I'm doing, I replied Knowledge Management. I could see clearly that he's grappling in his mind, what is knowledge management (KM). Then he asked me, can we manage knowledge since it is very much in the head? I told him, yes we can manage knowledge but it is not easy to do. He smiled...

Indeed, managing knowledge is difficult. Where I work in Malaysia, the organization has a comprehensive KM framework, covering both human and technological aspects. However, after almost 6 years of implementing KM, we are still struggling.

The organization has provided excellent infrastructure such as email, electronic forums, intranet, database systems and meeting rooms to promote sharing of knowledge. This is really good as I've seen good contents on the intranet, our databases are filled with data and a lot of documents are shared on the servers. However, those are more to explicit knowledge transfer/creation.

One problem that I realised about my organization is that the 'knowledge culture' is yet to flourish. Maybe due to the highly political background of the organization, but also due to the negative culture that has been within the organization for a very long time. For example, blaming is notoriously practiced there. Peter Senge did mention about this and blaming should stop for organization to succeed in managing its knowledge.

Another problem is that my workmates sometimes complained that there's no time for chit-chat which in turn limits the socialisation required to transfer tacit knowledge.

I'll stop here first to see if there's any feedbacks.

Have a productive k-day! :)