Knowledge management and its relationship with TQM

Abstract

With product life-cycles shortening and technologies becoming increasingly imitable, organization knowledge emerges as a major source of competitive advantage. Although Knowledge Management (KM) has promised to provide superb benefits, studies have showed that many are failing to exploit it. One of the main reasons is that people have no clear understanding of KM and knowledge. Accordingly, we have explored different KM perspectives – the object view and the process view, the tacit view and the explicit view – to clarify it. The object and process views explain how knowledge is generated through the cyclic interaction between knowledge stock and knowledge process flow. The tacit and the explicit views explain that there is no objective explicit knowledge independent of an individual's tacit knowledge. This points out the crucial role of human in KM. Moreover, we also propose that the full benefits of KM come from the third generation, which focuses on innovation. The first and second generation can only bring partial benefits that focus on gains from efficiencies and synergies. Based on Kanji's business excellence model, we compare the similarities and differences between KM and TQM. The similarities include: results orientation, people-based management, teamwork, leadership and delighting the customer. The differences consist of continuous improvement and management by fact, because KM focuses more on building a culture to support knowledge generation and sharing. We argue that both can complement one another if properly planned.