Page 61 - Volume_14

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

Immediately the programs and events will change, the physical makeup of the spaces
will change and even the rules and procedures will change to accommodate the
knowledge process in the library.

Secondly, when we start to manage the knowledge assets of our organisation, especially
tacit knowledge, our organisation will value us more resulting in more opportunities to
excel.

Thirdly and more importantly, epistemology and the value of knowledge is far greater
to what we are managing now. What we are doing now is already important and
meaningful, and it will be more meaningful and highly regarded if we upgrade ourselves
to managing knowledge. In the process we need to rally understand what is KM and
dispel some of the confusion that we are facing with the subject.

I had this conversation with my friend once and this conversation is really the issue that
we are still facing today and why some of us are still confused about KM.

‘‘Most organisations spent tremendous effort and investment in building the
infrastructure for knowledge such as knowledge repository, which in the end
becomes more like a routine process of coding, capturing and storing
knowledge. But, how much of these knowledge are being used or really useful
for the organisation ultimately? How do we know the quality of our [explicit
and tacit] knowledge? What is the real value of building KM systems and tools
based on yesterday's information?’’

These are legitimate questions and they are still valid today. To me, to have KM
happening in any organisation, Information Management (IM) has to be in place first.
The notion about capturing, coding and storing is more of IM rather than KM per se and
there is a very thin line separating these two now. I believe this is still a struggle in most
organisations and we have to move beyond this confusion collectively.

In summary, the processes for LIS, IM and KM are similar but managing knowledge
offers a greater impact.

CULTURE
I include culture in my definition of KM because I find it to be very important.
Knowledge processes, especially for tacit knowledge, are human-centric where the
quality of knowledge flows between human being very much depends on human
behaviour and feeling. These behaviours and feelings are the by-products of culture. One
main critical behaviour is the reluctance to share knowledge. This reluctance to share

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