James Wolfensohn's Definitions Of Knowledge Management

Anyone recognizing James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank president, in 1998 has been surprised by his decisions of budget for knowledge management. Creating a USD 55 million budget for knowledge management for fiscal in 1998, 3% of the bank 's entire administrative budget, Wolfensohn had come under a cloud of suspicion (Watson, 2007). However, the world-class knowledge management system captured and organized the institution’s knowledge and made the knowledge more readily accessible to the staff, clients and partners (Watson, 2007). Meanwhile, the system strengthened knowledge dissemination by linking with world-class sources of knowledge so that the bank would become more sophisticated with its development (Watson, 2007). As the World Bank develops, nobody today would regard Wolfensohn’s

The definitions of KM are diverse, but information management and human resource management are the two main aspects of it (Uriarte, 2008). The two aspects permeate in companies’ daily operations and engage KM by transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. On the other hand, there are four pillars of KM, namely management and the organization, infrastructure, people & culture and content management systems (Uriarte, 2008). The four pillars can help companies understand KM thoroughly. Since KM is important, companies usually will give a certain position for it called Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO). CKO is responsible for supporting and promoting knowledge, as well as capturing and sharing knowledge (Uriarte, 2008). Furthermore, CKO is also need to consider effective knowledge management to prevent risks and loss. Consequently, knowledge management is able to make organizational knowledge more productive and enlarge organizations’ competitive advantage because knowledge management can generate values from knowledge based assets (Uriarte,