Process execution in a knowledge management environment

Abstract

Knowledge is the most important asset of the enterprise in the knowledge economy. Intellectual capital is fast becoming more important than financial capital. The key to success does not rest in amassing knowledge, but in its ongoing use and renewal in the business processes which create value for the organization and allow it to maintain competitive advantage. This requires the ongoing and consistent management of the entire knowledge within the organization—not just knowledge belonging to the management itself, but to the entire personnel. A particular challenge in this respect is the management of tacit knowledge, the existence which is often overlooked or hard to articulate, and which is naturally revealed and created in the course of work itself. For this reason, the aim of this chapter is to answer the following question: Is it possible to integrate (dynamic) process management with knowledge management, including the management of tacit knowledge? Section 3.2 discusses the term knowledge and presents two selected models of knowledge management in the organization, with a particular focus on the sources of knowledge, the awareness of lacking knowledge, and processes of knowledge renewal and verification. Organizations in the knowledge economy face the challenge of avoiding the risk of owning outdated knowledge and pseudo-managing such knowledge, as well as the challenge of maintaining the pace of acquiring knowledge and instituting its broad practical use. Sections 3.3 and 3.4 demonstrate how the expansion of traditional process management with the concept of dynamic process management enables organizations to create new knowledge on an ongoing basis, as well as implement mechanisms of constant knowledge verification. The ability to perform limited experiments and acquire knowledge in the course of business process execution allows for the continued creation of practical knowledge and its objective and independent verification on the part of the clients. The last section of this chapter 3.5, presents the consequences of integrating dynamic BPM with knowledge management with a view to creating a learning-by-doing organization.