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Top2. Propeling Project Management With Knowledge Management
While this research is about global management trends, it is necessary to underline the importance of knowledge management (KM) within the discipline of project management.
The aforementioned statement takes us to the following Chinese proverb: A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (Chinese Proverbs, 2015). Therefore, let’s take our single step by denoting the concept of knowledge. In that sense, knowledge is the “understanding that germinates from combination of data, information, experience, and individual interpretation” (Business Dictionary, 2015, n.p.). Likewise, knowledge is “an essential resource for modern organizations to support sustainable competitive advantage” (Aboulkacem Guetat & Dhaou Dakhli, 2014, p. 39). Nevertheless, there are three categories of knowledge: tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge, and information knowledge (Wang & Yan, 2011).
Tacit knowledge resides on the person’s brain and explicit knowledge is usually embedded in products, services, methods, and facilities (Uriarte, 2008). On the other hand, information knowledge is stored in databases (Wang & Yan, 2011).
Correspondingly, the concept of KM “involves collecting, organizing, and distributing knowledge that is accumulated over a period of time for the purposes of improving and increasing a company’s competitive edge” (Kliem, 1999, p. 1).
As a matter of fact, KM is a very effective approach for dealing with organizations’ intellectual capital by capturing and distributing current knowledge and generating new innovative knowledge (An & Ahmad, 2010).
In today’s business landscape, knowledge is the fuel used by organizations to achieve competitive edge in order to be successful. Consequently, embracing knowledge-based organizations (KBO) can be the difference between success and failure.