Knowledge Management provides Tools designed to leverage an organization's information by converting it into knowledge. It enables organizations to efficiently aggregate, associate and disseminate knowledge to the parties that require it to conduct critical business activities. While most organizations have an abundance of information, it generally has not been digested or leveraged. As a result, this information that once had the potential to become useful knowledge remains a collection of stats and facts. Due to the vast amount of information and the infinite number of situations in which it can be used, it becomes progressively more difficult to provide the appropriate knowledge at the proper time. The inability to effectively capture information and convert it into knowledge has proven to be a source of significant inefficiencies for many organizations.

Knowledge Management not only enables organizations to intuitively associate and organize knowledge, but it also presents it in a manner that is efficient to digest. This approach has repeatedly created an impact on many organizations and provided them with the opportunity to improve profitability.

Focus of Knowledge Management in 2009 and beyond:

• Improving the performance of organizational systems and processes
• Preventing future bottlenecks and solving existing ones
• Cashing in on opportunities
• Persuading people to share
• Leveraging and using the uniqueness of the organization “to capitalize on the mix of people, processes, services and products that defines its identity and place in its competitive market”
• Building and exploiting the organization’s intellectual capital effectively
• Making knowledge more visible throughout the organization
• Increasing the abilities of employees to improve services and products
• Increasing customer satisfaction with services
• Enabling staff to handle a wider range of issues
• Shortening the durations of calls and reducing the escalation rates of problems
• Balancing the productivity objectives for KM with the requirements of knowledge workers' core jobs
• Integrating knowledge and the process of knowledge management with the organization’s strategic direction
• Taking on a specialized set of aims and objectives within a human resource management perspective, where recruitment may be seen as not being done to fill job vacancies, but with the idea of filling knowledge and skills gaps
• Capturing tacit knowledge: Most of the organizations focus on using knowledge to control costs, and maintain or increase market share and competitive advantage. This leads to a concentration on developing the technology required to capture and store the organization’s explicit, and more easily measured, knowledge base, almost to the exclusion of the more elusive, difficult to capture, tacit knowledge
• Identifying why knowledge management initiatives fail
• Viewing the organization as a human community capable of providing diverse meanings to information outputs generated by the technological systems, instead of the traditional emphasis on command and control.
• De-emphasizing the adherence to the "way things have always been done" so that such prevailing practices may be continuously assessed from multiple perspectives for their alignment with the dynamically changing external environment
• Encouraging diverse viewpoints by avoiding premature consensus on issues that need deeper analysis of underlying assumptions. Often, viewpoints of persons with differing backgrounds and expertise can provide a much broader focus that is essential for completely grasping the essence of the core issues, particularly when the changing context demands a fresh look at what was yesterday defined as a "benchmark" or a "best practice."
• Encouraging greater proactive involvement of human imagination and creativity to facilitate greater internal diversity to match the variety and complexity of the wicked environment.
• Giving more explicit recognition to tacit knowledge and related human aspects, such as ideals, values, or emotions, for developing a richer conceptualization of knowledge management
• Implementing new, flexible technologies and systems that support and enable communities of practice, informal and semi-informal networks of internal employees and external individuals based on shared concerns and interests
• Making the organizational information base accessible to organization members who are closer to the action, while simultaneously ensuring that they have the skills and authority to execute decisive responses to changing conditions
• Defining and communicating knowledge performance.
• Identifying key knowledge positions. In some positions, the way employees deal with knowledge can mean the difference between company success and failure. These jobs will need knowledge performance targets to match.
• Developing knowledge-sharing proficiencies. People across the organization need to know what it means to share and use knowledge. A dedicated team will need a special skill set to act as knowledge "brokers."
• Rewarding knowledge-sharing behaviors. Rewarding can be planned, explicit, and purposeful. If knowledge performance objectives are not part of a manager's job, the company will have little success in spreading the word.
• Encouraging networking and respect communities. Face-to-face or team meetings have a natural dynamic which transfers tacit knowledge. While KM needs to be incentivized and strongly embedded, be careful not to stifle Communities of Practice (COPs), which are often spontaneous hubs for knowledge transfer and a fertile seedbed for new ideas.
• Capturing best practice. From customer service to technical problems, most scenarios have already occurred. A little knowledge will go a long way.
• Mapping knowledge. "Content management" is often overlooked as part of a KM strategy. Mapping pulls together all sources of knowledge and creates a "virtual roadmap" so people can easily find the information they need, and helps lock KM into a course aimed at meeting business objectives.