Learning Organization or Knowledge Management – Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?

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The article, “Learning Organization or Knowledge Management – Which Came First, The Chicken or the Egg?” by Lena Aggestam of University of Skoevde, tries to identify the relationship between knowledge management and learning organization. She tries to pin point the factors that make these two concepts dependent on one another. She creates a keyword map and tries to find out the similar and dissimilar factors among the two and in doing so, she designs a holistic conceptual model. Below is a simple summary of the article. --------- What is knowledge management? As an introductory step it is useful to distinguish between raw information and knowledge. Raw information may be widely available to a number of agencies, but only some organizations will be able to convert the information into relevant knowledge and to use this knowledge to achieve their aims. The processes by which they do this are known as KM strategies. Therefore, knowledge management is the planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling of people, processes and systems in the organization to ensure that its knowledge-related assets are improved and effectively employed. Knowledge-related assets include knowledge in the form of printed documents such as patents and manuals, knowledge stored in electronic repositories such as a “best-practices” database, employees’ knowledge about the best way to do their jobs, knowledge that is held by teams who have been working on focused problems and knowledge that is embedded in the organization’s products, processes and relationships. The processes of KM involve knowledge acquisition, creation, refinement, storage, transfer, sharing, and utilization. The KM function in the organization operates these processes, develops methodologies and systems to support them, and motivates people to participate in them. On the other hand, Learning Organization is a

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