The Role for Knowledge Management in Modern Healthcare Delivery

2. Knowledge Management

The nations that lead the world into the next century will be those who can shift from being industrial economies, based upon the production of manufactured goods, to those that possess the capacity to produce and utilize knowledge successfully. The focus of the many nations’ economy has shifted first to information-intensive industries such as financial services and logistics, and now toward innovation-driven industries, such as computer software and biotechnology, where competitive advantage lies mostly in the innovative use of human resources. This represents a move from an era of standardization to an era of innovation where knowledge, its creation and management hold the key to success (Bukowitz & Williams, 1997; Drucker, 1993, 1999).

Knowledge management is a key approach to help solve current business problems such as competitiveness and the need to innovate that are faced by organizations today. The premise for knowledge management is based on a paradigm shift in the business environment where knowledge is central to organizational performance (Swan et al., 1999; Newell et al., 2002). In essence, knowledge management not only involves the production of information but also the capture of data at the source, the transmission and analysis of this data as well as the communication of information based on or derived from the data to those who can act on it (Davenport & Prusak, 1998). Thus, data and information represent critical raw assets in the generation of knowledge while successful knowledge management initiatives require a tripartite view; namely the incorporation of people, processes and technologies (Wickramasinghe, 2003).