KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN BUSINESS- A REVIEW OF TECHNIQUES AND TOOLS Parul Sinha*, Monika Arora**, Narendra Mohan Mishra*** *Assistant Professor, Deptt of Information Systems, IILM Institute for Higher Education, Gurgaon, India. Email: parul.psinha@gmail.com **Department of IT, Apeejay School of Management, Dwarka Institutional Area, New Delhi, India. Email: marora.asm@gmail.com ***Associate Professor, IMT-CDL Ghaziabad, India. Email: nmmishra@hotmail.com Abstract Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) are gaining strategic importance in business these days. They are acting as key enablers of business performance monitoring and catalyst for the business processes. The acceptance of this new strategy and inal implementation still remain full of apprehensions and it demands a lot of future research on a global scale. Through Knowledge Management Systems, organisations seek to acquire and create potentially useful knowledge. This should give way to making it available to those who use it at appropriate time and place and achieve maximum effective usage which positively inluences organisational performance. In this paper an effort is made by the authors to review some of the techniques and tools which have enabled organisations worldwide to implement knowledge management activities with a well-informed approach successfully. Keywords: Knowledge, Knowledge Management (KM), Knowledge Management System (KMS), Knowledge Management Software, Knowledge Workers. 1. Knowledge Knowledge is a broad and abstract belief that has been of growing interest in the corporate and academic sectors. It is acquiring position as a signiicant organisational resource. Inluenced by the quantum rise in quality and quantity of organisational knowledge and knowledge management (KM) issues and concerns, a new class of information systems have been promoted and created, referred to as Knowledge Management Systems (KMS). The objective of a KMS is to support creation, transfer, and application of knowledge in organisations. Nonaka (1994) has stated two dimensions of knowledge in organisations: tacit and explicit. Rooted in action, experience, and involvement in a speciic context, the tacit dimension of knowledge (or tacit knowledge) is comprised of both cognitive and technical elements. The explicit dimension of knowledge (or explicit knowledge) is articulated, codiied, and communicated in symbolic form and/or natural language. Whether tacit or explicit knowledge is the more valuable is debatable. The two are not classiications of knowledge, but mutually dependent and reinforcing qualities of knowledge: tacit knowledge forms the background necessary for assigning the structure to develop and interpret explicit knowledge (Polanyi, 1975), refer Figure 1. Figure 1: The Two dimensions of Knowledge (http://www.cognitivedesignsolutions. com/KM/ExplicitTacit.htm) The interwoven linkage of tacit and explicit knowledge suggests that only individuals with a requisite level of shared knowledge can truly exchange knowledge, thus for effective knowledge sharing, there must be some overlap in the underlying knowledge bases (a shared knowledge space) of the two individuals who interact (Ivari and Linger, 1999; Tuomi ,1999). By applying technology we can manage “weak ties” (i.e. informal and casual contacts among individuals) Article can be accessed online at http://www.publishingindia.com