Knowledge Management for Knowledge Workers

Knowledge workers represent more than half of all employees in advanced economies. In general knowledge workers are people who, when working, use their brain more than their muscles. While agricultural and industrial worlds depended on the work of manual workers and the life standard of their inhabitants and the success of agricultural and industrial organizations grew due to the increase of manual worker productivity, existing knowledge economy depends on the work of knowledge workers and the labour productivity they can achieve. Major creative force of knowledge worker is knowledge. Quality of work of knowledge workers depend not only on their ability to create, distribute and share knowledge but also on how the work with knowledge is organized in their organizations. Knowledge as a changing system with interactions among experience, skills, facts, relationships, values, thinking processes and meanings (Veber 2000) consists of two dimensions, explicit and tacit. Explicit dimension of knowledge can be expressed in formal and systematic language and can be shared in the form of data, scientific formulae, specifications, manuals. Tacit dimension of knowledge is highly personal and hard to discover and formalize. Explicit knowledge and intuition, mental models, experience, abilities, skills, etc. create it. It is deeply rooted in action, procedures, routines, commitments, ideas, values and emotions. It is difficult to share and communicate. Knowledge workers work with both dimensions of knowledge. Explicit knowledge is usually present in the form of data in some information system; tacit knowledge is linked to its human holder or holders. Organizations do not usually have problem to organize work with explicit knowledge. ICT and modern information systems offer many solutions how to adjust work with explicit knowledge to needs of knowledge workers of individual organizations. Tacit knowledge is more problematic. Organizations tend to underestimate it and do not create or even inhibit environment that is necessary for its sharing. The empiric research on knowledge management in Czech organizations has started at the University of Economics, Prague in 2004 and goes on to these days. The article discusses chosen results of this research.