Knowledge Management is a set of process that formalize the collection, sharing, storing, reusing, and gaining insights from amassing the knowledge (both tacit and explicit), of an organization. The dissemination process of the knowledge under management provides
access to knowledge that is timely, accurate and easy to consume. The accessed knowledge aids in decision making, and the available knowledge facilitates in creation or generation of new knowledge.
A goal of knowledge management is to capture and share knowledge wherever it resides in the organization. Leveraging the corporate collective know-how will improve decision making and innovation where it is needed. Organizations do not make decisions just based on one factor; the total picture is what should drive decisions. KM enables organizations to take the total picture of an organization’s collective intelligence. Fueled by KM will empower people at organizations to make decisions using the vast amount and variety of knowledge available in the enterprise.
The emerging challenge for organizations is to derive meaningful insights from available data and re-apply it intelligently. Knowledge management plays a crucial role in effectively providing all employees with the processes and tools to enhance their intelligence. As employees become more knowledgeable, collaborate and share what they know, the collective intelligence of an organization will also improve.
Collective Intelligence
Collective Intelligence (CI) refers to an organization’s ability to perform better and smarter than the sum of its members’ intelligence and talent. CI is achieved by leveraging the input of multiple people within and outside the organization (Ancona et al., 2019). CI is driven by the enhanced capacity that is created when people work together, with the help that KM provides to mobilize a wide range of data, information, ideas and insights —- Knowledge!
Collective intelligence depends both on the intelligence of each member of the group and on group dynamics, such as interaction style, balanced communication, and balanced conversations. CI is further enhanced by KM. When a group comes together to solve a problem, and/or innovate on ideas, access to knowledge both explicit and tacit contribute to the group’s ability to be successful. CI enhanced with KM will deliver to all staff the decision-making power optimized by providing dynamic, accurate and personal access to knowledge.
KM improves CI by:
- Enabling Dynamic knowledge through constant updating adhering to your organization’s content (information and knowledge) lifecycle management processes. This also includes connecting the experts who can provide insights about the knowledge. The Dynamic component of knowledge reflects your organizations evolve its knowledge assets over time.
- Enabling the Accurate component of knowledge, to connect the authoritative source and authoritative voice for all knowledge assets. This knowledge is accepted by your organization as the “source of truth”.
- Enabling the Personalized component of knowledge to answer the questions that the users of your knowledge are seeking. Personalized knowledge is tailored to what an individual need to make a decision and presented in a way that is consumable to answer to their questions. Personalized knowledge is facilitated by how knowledge flows throughout your organization.
“Collective intelligence is the body of knowledge that grows out of a group. When groups of people work together, they create intelligence that cannot exist on an individual level. Making decisions as a group, forming a consensus, getting ideas from different sources, and motivating people through competition are all components of collective intelligence.” —- Thomas Malone, the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at MIT
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