Establishment of KM Infrastructure

The business world is increasingly competitive, and the demand for innovative products and services is even greater. In this century of creativity and ideas, the most valuable resources available to any organization are human skills, expertise, and relationships. Knowledge management (KM) is about capitalizing on these precious assets (Duffy, 2001). Most companies do not capitalize on the wealth of expertise in the form of knowledge scattered across their levels (Hansen et al., 2001). Information centers, market intelligence, and learning are converging to form knowledge management functions.

The KM infrastructure, in terms of tools and technologies (hardware as well as software), should be established so that knowledge can be created from any new events or activity on a continual basis. This is the most important component of a learning organization. The entire new know-how or new knowledge can only be created for exchange if the KM infrastructure is established effectively. The KM infrastructure will have a repository of knowledge and distribution systems to distribute the knowledge to the members of an organization and a facilitator system for the creation of new knowledge. A knowledge-based infrastructure will foster the creation of knowledge and provide an integrated system to share and diffuse the knowledge in the organization (Srikantaiah, 2000).