Km Research Paper

If information is the currency of the knowledge economy, human expertise is the bank where it is kept, invested and exchanged - the researcher. “A firm’s competitive advantage depends more than anything on its knowledge: on what it knows- how it uses what it knows – and how fast it can know something new.” – HR Magazine 2009, p.1. It is no longer a controversy that we live in a globalised world characterised by fast information transfer across large geographic areas by means of the Internet. The consequence of this globalization is the emergence of knowledge-based economies where importance is placed on effective management of human capital to ensure that workers continue to create the right value for the economy. Nowadays, organisations no

In recent years, the importance of KM has been widely recognized as the foundations of industrialized economies shifted from natural resources to intellectual assets. Since 1995 there has been an explosion in the literature surrounding the developing concept of KM. Today, there is hardly a conference or published journal without seeing literature referring to the concept, KM. The importance of KM as a critical tool in organisation and the society can therefore not be overemphasised. As Desouza (2011) put it, KM has become a trendy buzzword. Much of the interest in KM came from the realization that organisations compete on their knowledge-based assets. Even noncompetitive organisations (e.g. governmental institutions and nonprofits organisations) succeed or fail based on their ability to leverage their knowledge-based assets. It is stated by Teng and Song (2011) that the importance of KM is no longer restricted to knowledge intensive firms in the high-tech industries but to all sectors of the economy. Zack (2003) further says that even companies in the traditional industries, such as cement, can benefit greatly from KM. In essence KM is beneficial to all sectors, be it educational, banking, telecommunications, production/manufacturing, and even the public