Page 56 - Volume_14

Jurnal PPM: Journal of Malaysian Librarians
Vol. 14, 2020

storage and retrieval; environmental scanning, information and knowledge repackaging;
and library space building and planning. All these are the functional competencies of the
discipline where most are dealing primarily with codified information in the form of
documents, books, reports, artefacts and databases. They are the functional competencies
to manage information within its process value chain.

Whereas behavioural competencies such as leadership, communication and marketing
are covered within the scope of functional competencies.

The Faculty of Information Management also covers the topic of knowledge
management and let us discuss the discipline of the subject.

The discipline of KM starts with the understanding of the elements of knowledge. In this
article, there will not be a deep epistemology discussion on the topic. Suffice to say, as
in information science, the discipline deals with knowledge both as an object more so as
a flow. Knowledge is a twin of learning and the more we look into the subject, it could
be the byproduct of each other. As such, the question of why, KM is looked at in a bit
more detail to fully understand its importance. Understandably, this is being looked at
from two dimensions of knowledge as corporate assets as well as knowledge as valuable
personal assets in human development and civilisation. Hence, the importance of
studying and understanding the knowledge lifecycle and process as well as any
behaviour or culture in relation to the process of knowledge creation, sharing, usage and
safekeeping. Particularly when we are talking about the knowledge that resides within
the human being namely the so-called experts. These processes will be discussed in a bit
more detail in the next section

In essence, when we have identified the knowledge that we need to manage, we will start
to process them so that they will be easily available, accessible and understood by the
intended users. Just like in LIS, we have to process and make the knowledge available
to the users. This also necessitates the knowledge manager to develop a system. This
covers information processing, analysis, repackaging, storage and retrieval. In this case,
almost the whole discipline of LIS. Let us compare the competencies required of both.

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