Knowledge Management and Its Applications

The assignment delves into the concept of knowledge management, listing legislation and national standards relevant to it, such as the Privacy Act and AS 5037:2005 Knowledge Management – Guide. It also highlights key benefits and barriers to knowledge sharing, including lack of contact time and interaction between knowledge sources and recipients, low awareness and realization of the value of possessed knowledge, poor verbal/written communication and interpersonal skills, gender differences, and lack of trust in people. The document further examines existing and emerging technologies that support knowledge management, including artificial intelligence, electronic discussion groups, computer-based simulations, databases, decision support systems, expert systems, and Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis and blogs.

Assessment 2: Test
Q1. Describe the concept of knowledge management in your own words
Based on my perspective regarding knowledge management, KM is the effective use of
knowledge that will be used and given by and for the right people to outcomes deliveries. Also,
it can be seen as a strategy to ensure that a company can learn, that it will be able to retrieve
and to use its knowledge in situations and projects that they are needed. At the end, it will
create benefits and competitive advantage to the company.
Q2. List legislation, codes of practice, and national standards relevant to knowledge
management.
The four most important legislation and national standards when it comes to knowledge
management in Australia are:
I. Privacy Act
II. Confidentiality legislation
III. Freedom of information legislation
IV. AS 5037:2005 Knowledge management – Guide
Q3. List and briefly describe three key benefits of knowledge management.
1. Share knowledge across the business and generate culture changings for the company
benefit from this information, using the right people for the right tasks.
2. It creates competitive advantage to the company as the company is managing their
knowledge in order to reach their goals. As they do have settled a goal, manage knowledge is
essential to know how to get here.
3. Within knowledge management, staff will learn within the company as well as they can
delivery exactly what the company needs. Managing knowledge is not easy, however, if the
company has the right people, to reach their goals will be easier.
Q4. What are the key organizational barriers to knowledge sharing? Briefly describe at least five
such barriers in your own words.

1. Lack of contact time and interaction between knowledge sources and recipients. Having
no time and interaction with colleagues for knowledge communication may lead to no
cooperation and demonstrate poor performance. Frequent communication increases
confidence and improve employees’ communication skills.
2. Low awareness and realization of the value and benefit of possessed knowledge to
others. Knowledge possessed by an individual through training and experiences are vital
and must be taken full advantage for employees with lack of knowledge and experience
as it will provide efficient and effective employee management.
3. Poor verbal/written communication and interpersonal skills. Poor skills and ineffective
communication causes misunderstandings and conflicts at work.
4. Gender differences. Style differences during decision making is a common gender
barrier to communication. Women are process-oriented and prefer to gather
information, whereas men rely on a product-driven communication style. When an issue
arises in the workplace, a female leader is likely to seek the advice of other colleagues.
5. Lack of trust in people because they misuse knowledge or take unjust credit for it.
Communication must involve trust, commitment and confidence. This barrier is due to
employee’s thinking of work blame, sabotage, misuse or to take credit for work.
Q5. What is the Australian Standard for Knowledge? Briefly describe key features of the
standard
In Australia, there are some indicators for standard for knowledge, which can be indicators such
as:
• Benchmarking which, in this context, ‘may focus on cultural and leadership practices;
business and technology processes that enable knowledge creation, sharing and use’
• Attempts to measure ‘intellectual capital’, an area in which models and methodologies
are apparently still evolving, but which includes, for instance, trying to ‘establish a relationship
between the earnings/costs and the impact of knowledge management on organizational
objectives’
• Those evaluation tools discussed in the section on enablers, namely, knowledge
auditing, knowledge mapping and social network analysis.
Q6. Briefly describe the following terms, and where they might be applicable:
Correlation calculations
Correlation calculations are useful in business as it make possible to measure strength and
direction of a linear relationship between two variables. This is helpful to compare statistics,
information, data and surveys in a certain period of time.

Probability assessment
The probability assessment can be used as a business guideline for different factors that an
organization needs to analyze. For example, a company can use probability assessments to
analyze data regarding their customer’s purchase behavior in order to calculate the probability
of success regarding a new product launching.
Regulation analyses
Regulations analyses can be applied to industries that require certain regulations and guidelines
in order to create a fair and trustworthy industry environment.
Dynamic programming
This is a mathematical optimization method or computer programming method that can be
applied to economics and business purposes. It refers to simplifying problems by breaking it
down into a simpler sub problems, which will be turn problem-solving much easier in
organizations.
Linear programming
This mathematical technique can be applied on maximising or minimising a linear function of
several variables, such as outputs or costs in business or finances.
Queuing theory
This theory can be applied to companies such as supermarket, pharmacies,
telecommunications, computer networking, etc. It is helpful when it comes to priorities
management, controlling, and to increase performance.
Simulation
Simulations can be used in business to predict the future, in finances, marketing, new product
test and launchings.
Transportation methodology
It can be applied in business for example on Sperling's method, quantitative surveys, and
feedbacks, methods for information processing, questionnaire survey and customer evaluation.
Q7. Give examples of existing and emerging technologies and how they can be used in
knowledge and information management.
Existing and emerging technologies that support knowledge management include artificial
intelligence (AI) technologies including those used for knowledge acquisition and case-based
reasoning systems, electronic discussion groups, computer-based simulations, databases,

decision support systems, enterprise resource planning systems, expert systems, management
information systems, expertise locator systems, videoconferencing, and information
repositories including best practices databases and lessons learned systems. Knowledge
management technologies also include the emergent Web 2.0 technologies, such as wikis and
blog (Becerra-Fernandez and Sabherwal, 2010).