Difference between revisions of "Reuse"
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Revision as of 10:25, 19 November 2013
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Definition
Reuse is Utilizing knowledge more than once. Source: [[]]
Summary
Description
Organizational knowledge creation and enhancement is a continuous process whereas knowledge application can be infrequent. Unless an organization does something proactive, it may never ‘know what it knows’. The corollary is also true — an organization may not know what it does not know. These areas of unknown are sometimes referred to as knowledge gaps.
When a knowledge gap is identified, it may be possible to implement a system element (resource, process or tool) to ‘fill’ the gap. Clearly, it would good business practice to later evaluate the effectiveness of the action and assess its impact on the knowledge management system.
It may also be possible to measure, in some way, the use of explicit information before and after the adoption of knowledge management techniques. After all, it is the ability to better share knowledge that is the key to success. This type of analysis could also highlight the way in which specific sources of information and knowledge are used which then leads to a better understanding of the non-documented links between sources. This type of analysis can be extended to implicit knowledge if staff are made aware of its existence, for example, the number of times access is given to a corporate level skills and experience matrix or a ‘yellow pages’ could provide an indication of access to undocumented information sources (that is, co-workers).
An organization could, potentially, obtain some sort of qualitative assessment of the ‘before-and-after’ level of worker morale. Improvements to the application of existing ‘knowledge resources’ (for example, routine reporting of the use of current knowledge to improve a particular business process; the reduction in time necessary to find or rediscover existing knowledge) might be considered in order to demonstrate the benefits of adopting knowledge management techniques. Generally, a worker’s morale will be improved if they can quickly and efficiently find the information or knowledge they seek. Where communities of practice are used, it may be possible to measure changes in productivity. Improved efficiency can be measured by recording the number of steps (for example number of staff consulted) to discover a knowledge source compared to a random and untargeted request for assistance.
Measuring and assimilating the benefits of adopting a range of knowledge management techniques is the key to determining the degree of success. Knowledge management is not concerned so much with the action of creation in itself, but creation of the right knowledge at the right time and providing a means of accessing it. The benefits that arise from sharing, identifying gaps, linking sources and improving quality through lessons learned will follow.
Source: Knowledge management for radioactive waste management organisations
Description
References
[1]
