With the coming era of knowledge economy, enterprises are gradually aware of the importance of “knowledge management”. Business management is different from financial management, human resources management and other sectors. The impact level of knowledge management is deeper and even affect the company’s formation of culture.

Knowledge management is often seen as a broadly representative term, including brainstorming, formal meetings, informal discussions, briefings, etc., and as well as variety of data collection and accumulation. Nowadays, whether its academic research or practical analysis, the definition of “knowledge management” has its own unique definition.

However, according to our practical experience combined with theoretical in-depth study, we believe that “knowledge management should be defined as a well-managed system, can be sustained and universally collected resources. At the same time, knowledge management is also an interactive process. Not only gather and collect the information, but also to further transform the corporate culture, so that people pay more attention to “information exchange”. Because of this interaction, that makes knowledge management even more valuable.

 Knowledge management can be divided into three levels:

The first layer is the retention of knowledge – the documentation within the organization.

The second layer is the sharing of knowledge –  the use of good strategy to help the knowledge flow and exchange and create interaction within the organization.

The third level is the ultimate knowledge management.  Employees absorb knowledge, determine new problems and then create new knowledge.

 According to the GartnerGroup study, 70% of the value of the knowledge management system to utilize in sharing Know-how. From that example we can see the most immediate benefit of knowledge management is to promote the sharing of knowledge.

Human being is the main component of the organization. By knowledge-sharing and interaction in the organization, knowledge management can be extended its highest value. Whether it is to retain knowledge, to share knowledge, or to create knowledge, “people’s behavior” plays an important role. However, because of some human behaviors, it is very difficult to implement in some stages, for example:

• Knowledge often represents status and advantage

Employees are often reluctant to share his/her working experience. It is a very important to encourage employees and provide incentives.

• Knowledge should be flowing around

If the knowledge is not retained properly, it will be lost by staff leaving their position or simply forgotten. It is important to establish an appropriate system to help employees capturing these important messages.

• The transmission of knowledge is often stagnant

For example, some products in the market out of stock for a long time. The production line did not know this situation. The problem is that the information has not be immediately passed to the person who needs to know.

• Knowledge is decentralized

For example, companies have different teams, and branches, will make it difficult to share these common resources. At this stage, an effective workflow should be established so that different work teams can share and contribute to the knowledge which then be able to make efficient use of the company’s internal knowledge.

• Knowledge is easily disappeared

For example, group meeting often come up with many valuable ideas. If the meeting content has not been recorded immediately, it is often forgotten and lost when time goes by. Therefore It is time to capture these ideas and realize it further.

The knowledge management system is the idea of access, organization, recovery of information. Knowledge is closely linked to human factors. Therefore, when design knowledge management system, organization should take into consideration of the human and social factors, where people create, cycle and share the information in order to solve the above problems.