Information and Knowledge Management for Managers

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In the current uncertain and ever-changing business environment, knowledge has become the most important basis for sustainable competitive advantage. Learning from past mistakes and avoiding repeating the mistake are essential tasks and all organization today must look for ways to make the best use of its knowledge. With Canon being a multinational company which mainly involves in inventing new products and enhancement of existing products, leveraging the organization‟s knowledge becomes important.

The purpose of this report is to gain better understanding of how company with entirely knowledge-based services are using information and knowledge management. It was found from the studies that the company has been focused on the management of explicit knowledge rather than creating an atmosphere for transforming tacit knowledge of experts to explicit knowledge. However, the necessity of managing the tacit knowledge sharing is becoming more important due to the upcoming demographic changes faced by all companies. The staffs who were born in the middle part of the 20th century will soon reach the retirement age and this is anticipated to create an extensive loss of knowledge. Due to this, company is actually facing dilemma of over bridging the knowledge gap between the more experienced senior employees who have accumulated plenty of knowledge and the novel ones.

In order to improve the knowledge sharing among staff, continuous lessons learned gathering throughout the project or work cycle needs to be put into practice. This can be primarily achieved through collecting lessons learned at the regular project meetings and implementation of reporting system after completion of each project. Creations of forums for knowledge sharing together with management support through actions, feedback and the introduction of a culture aimed at knowledge learning will further improve the retention and reutilization of the company‟s knowledge-base.

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