Document management system: An explicit knowledge management system

Knowledge management has become an important aspect of any enterprise today. In today's competitive environment capturing and sharing of knowledge are important for correct and timely decisions. Knowledge can be classified as mission critical, confidential or open knowledge. It may exist in variety of sources, formats and devices viz, in people's heads, databases, files etc. According to Larry Prusak, Executive Director of the Institute for Knowledge Management, the practice of Knowledge Management (KM) is “getting the right knowledge in the right context to the right people at the right time.” Knowledge Management is an integrated approach to identify, create, manage, share, and exploit all information and knowledge assets of an organization.[6] Knowledge is of different types namely tacit and explicit. Tacit knowledge is possessed by people and difficult to capture or share. Explicit knowledge is reasonably self-contained. The users can understand easily and learn how to use the same effectively. In this paper we have discussed about a system that is based on the concept of organizational document management system (DMS) for capturing explicit knowledge available in organization in the form of reports, documents etc. for sharing among the users. The system has been implemented successfully. ^[1]