Page 65 - Volume_14

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

initiatives started with creating visibility to their explicit and tacit knowledge and
only later onmaking them accessible.

• Knowledge loss is very real. What about the value of the knowledge loss not
accounted for?
One of the biggest worry of any organisation is the potential loss of its critical
knowledge assets. The potential knowledge loss can happen due to several things and
some are not obvious to us. Examples of a few of the potential knowledge loss are
through downsizing of human resource, retirement, resignation, job rotation,
placement and worst of all, their knowledge are not properly captured, kept and
managed. Another risk associated with this is the potential replacement cost of the
knowledge lost. At times it is not just about the replacement cost, it is also the total
value of the knowledge that has been taken or walked away from the organisation.
This is a real business issue for organisation especially when the knowledge walks
away to competitors.

• Explicit knowledge transformed from tacit knowledge are generally kept in isolation
without any link to the sourced tacit knowledge. Resulting in ‘lost in translation’ with
the possibility of no other person understanding the knowledge, let alone use them
effectively.
The nature of tacit knowledge is that it is alive and has a high degree of context in
understanding it and its application. We make the mistake of firstly thinking that we
can really codify and transform tacit knowledge into explicit and once done, we
continue to manage it as explicit knowledge without linking it back to the original
source of tacit knowledge. In a library world, this means that for any codified tacit
knowledge such as reports or lessons learnt, we should provide an active link to the
original author. This will enable any reader to have access to the author to clarify and
get proper context to the meaning of the question and answer.

• A lot of data and information but not knowledge because the knowledge process
value chain is not managed.
A lot of data and information are collected and kept, but we fail to turn them into
knowledge that we can use in decision making. For example, in a library, we collect
user statistics and we do not analyse the statistics for better decision making.

BENEFITS OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Let us discuss this topic on the benefits of KM from the perspectives of Business Process,
Talent Satisfaction and, Learning and Growth. We will look at them both as benefits to
an organisation in general and a library specifically.

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