A Personal Knowledge Management Tool That Supports Organizational Knowledge Management

This paper describes the concept and design of PK-MAST (a Personal Knowledge Management And Sharing Tool), which is a novel knowledge management tool and framework that seeks to bridge the gap between personal knowledge management and organizational knowledge sharing. PK-MAST gives the user a strong ‘personal’ feel in capturing knowledge for his/her own purposes and is very easy to use, but it also supports selective knowledge sharing with minimal effort from the user. Introduction Knowledge management is a process of creating, capturing, distributing, and using knowledge effectively. Knowledge, information and data are distinguished as follows. Data are raw facts. Information is data with context and perspective. Knowledge is information with guidance for action based upon insight and experience. The appropriate use of knowledge is wisdom. It has become commonplace to distinguish between the management of knowledge on a personal level and on an organizational level. The transformation of data-toinformation-to-knowledge and the reverse is the foundation of information retrieval, decision-making, data mining and the knowledge management (Spiegler 2000). Knowledge management turns raw data into information (finished product) and after that into knowledge (actionable finished goods). In organizations, this knowledge is not only stored in document and electronic repositories but also in organizational routines, processes, and norms (Davanport & Prusak, 1998). Knowledge is one of the most important assets of an organization, and knowledge is held by people. Many managers would readily admit that knowledge is difficult to manage. Organizations need to create an environment where people can explore, share and put to work the knowledge that they have. A critical tool to support this environment is a knowledge management system. Knowledge management systems are widely used to manage know-how solutions that are captured from daily business processes. The knowledge is normally structured and stored in a database. Because employees are generally inactive in updating databases, extra resources are necessary to keep the database up-to-date. Knowledge is generally classified into two categories, i.e. explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. According to Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), tacit knowledge is something not easily visible and expressible. The tacit knowledge is regarded as the most valuable and actionable at the same time hard to formalize and highly personal. Explicit knowledge can be expressed as something formal and systematic (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). The knowledge included in work manuals, procedures, codes, audio and video records, which have originally been created with the goal of communicating with another person, is described as the explicit knowledge. Knowledge assets of an organization are based on contributions from individual employees at various levels. An employee with solid personal knowledge is of little value to the organization unless the individual can convert his or her explicit or tacit knowledge to the organizational knowledge base that is sharable by the concerned employees. On the other hand, personal knowledge management (PKM) focuses on understanding how a knowledge worker’s activities contribute to the worker's own performance. Users are relatively self-motivated in using PKM tools to manage their own information. An obvious limitation of current PKM tools is that they only provide knowledge management support at an individual level. Organization knowledge indeed comes from individuals and there is the potential to develop PKM tools that can be used to capture knowledge by individuals and share it with others without the overheads of organisation-wide knowledge management systems.