Keynote abstract
While the human brain is the most powerful resource on planet earth, very few subjects during your curriculum are providing you with the instructions on how to use it and how to use it to your benefit.
One of the methods of analyzing and auditing your own knowledge and the knowledge of your organization is knowledge management. In defining boundaries of your knowledge, through the knowledge competency map, following questions should be asked: Do you know what you know?, Do you know what you do not know?, Do you not know what you know?, Do you not know what you do not know?
This way, systemic and human oriented approach is followed, by the intellectual capital management and participative development of systems supporting the management of skills (learning systems), information (information systems), experience (experience systems) and attitudes (human resources – compensation, selection, career development systems).
Analogous to the story of the "6 Blind Men & the Elephant", depending on where the blind men are feeling the elephant, they will describe the animal differently. Similarly, there are different approaches to discussing the importance and the power of Knowledge Management (KM), both on the individual and the corporate level. The more we learn about knowledge, related skills, information, experience and attitudes related to the knowledge management, the better we will understand the importance and benefits of this "intangible capital" which can be amplified, transformed and applied to improve individual and business performance, creating value and wealth for stakeholders. Presentation will concentrate on definitions and dimensions of knowledge, with emphasis on tacit and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is internal wealth of personal know-how (personal schemas) and is deeply communicated. It is personal, context specific and, therefore, hard to formalize and communicate. Explicit knowledge is collection of codified, documented and deliberately shared and communicated external knowledge. It can be transmitted in formal and systematic languages. Transformation of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge is creating new knowledge, and when explicit knowledge is internalized into tacit knowledge, it prompts action and change in behaviour, creating "actionable knowledge". Knowledge principles and characteristics will be reviewed, with emphasis on the fact that knowledge is universal, inexhaustible, expands with use and presents an asset that has no diminishing return. When created and shared, knowledge multiplies and becomes more valuable. Knowledge Creation and Conversion Process (Nonaka & Takueichi SECI Processes) will be presented, with emphasis on all cycle stages - from tacit knowledge to tacit knowledge (socialization), from tacit to explicit knowledge (externalization), from explicit to explicit knowledge (combination), and from explicit to tacit knowledge (internalization). The role of learning individual and learning organization and the impact of both on the human resources practice, will be show. Based on definition of KM as the skill to "create, identify and capture knowledge, distribute the right knowledge to the right people at the right time, putting the information into action in ways that improve individual and community health", vision of "education related KM" has been created that consists of following elements: an increasingly diverse body of students, understanding their own learning styles; an increasingly diverse faculty, adopting a diversity of teaching approaches to the range of students' learning styles, a curriculum with geographic and temporal flexibility, learning environments that will be content-rich, media-rich, interprofessional relationships that will build bridges and facilitate exchange of discipline based theories and research and leadership in interprofessional learning and application.
While there are no final answers for any organizational and personal behavior, there are always different ways of looking at problems. It is only through new perspectives that the new insights are possible. And it is only through new insights that we can outgrow the borders of our competency maps and broaden the limits of our own skill inventories. Best wishes for safe journey.
