Knowledge Management: Itm 501, Slp 1

Organizations in all business sectors are looking to knowledge management as the solution to their problems. These organizations may be looking to capture the knowledge of their employees who are set to retire or to reduce redundancy and increase productivity. The question that is on the minds of the organization’s leadership is “will knowledge management work for us?” To answers this question, we will examine three organizations using three case studies. We will see how knowledge management was used to tackle and overcome the issues they were faced with. The three organizations in question are Frito-Lay, NASA and Northrop Grumman. To begin, we will take a look at how each organization defined knowledge management.

When speaking about knowledge management, it is best to know how your organization will define it. The three organizations in the case studies understood that knowledge management could help, but two lacked a clear definition. Frito-Lay did not have a well-developed definition; however, they knew it could help in capturing best practices and corporate information. Similar to Frito-Lay, North Grumman did not have an observable definition. Northrop Grumman viewed knowledge management as a way to increase innovation and speed customer responsiveness. NASA had the clearest definition of all three organizations. They defined knowledge management as “getting the right information to the right people at the right time, and helping people create knowledge and share and act upon information in ways that will measurably improve the performance of an organization and its partners” (Murphy & Holm, 2008). Whatever definition these organizations gave, the need to utilize knowledge management came from the problems that each one faced.

In comparing the issues that these organizations faced, it is vital that we do not simply consider their mission’s significance. For example, can the need to better marketing snack chips truly be compared to the...