Knowledge Management and High Performance Organizations Essay

Knowledge Management and High Performance Organizations - Essay Example As the essay stresses human knowledge may be an organization’s most valuable asset, much of this knowledge is never shared. Harnessing critical knowledge and using it to create a common vision and objectives can move a company closer to making an HPO. KM supports the notion of HPO through â€Å"†¦organizational values, culture, processes and tools that stimulate and support the organization's employees, partners and customers to create, capture, organize, access, and properly use the organization’s knowledge that enables people to personally and collectively become more productive, collaborative and innovative†. According to the paper findings the trend toward serious management changes made by large companies on the way toward making high-performance organizations is stressed in numerous theoretical and empirical studies. These changes revolve around one of the four commonly recognized approaches to organizational performance, namely employee involvement, total quality management, re-engineering, and knowledge management. Although neither of these categories can be addressed as simple knowledge management is â€Å"...the least well-defined and articulated of the four organizational improvement concepts†. Knowledge Management (KM) is a very broad discipline that integrates a number of organisational endeavours and practices used by different organisations in a variety of ways in order to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge and thus ensure competitive advantage of the company. KM represents one of the most recent developments in the long line of organisational tools a nd techniques such as 'the scientific management', X and Y' theory', 'T-groups', 'total quality management', 'organizational learning' 'systems thinking', 'benchmarking', 'business process re-engineering' and other methods meant to create economic value and competitive advantage. After becoming an independent established discipline in the middle of 1990s, KM is perceived as an essential aspect of HRM and information technology in modern organisations (Davenport & Prusak, 1998). The integrative and rather broad nature of KM contributes to the difficulties associated with defining this paradigm. Generally, KM is viewed as a new form of management which facilitates organizational adaptation, survival and competence in face of increasingly dynamic environmental changes. This broader perspective incorporates the processes of knowledge use, knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, knowledge transfer and knowledge renewal with each of these concepts being defined independently (Malhotra 2000). Therefore, Skyrme (2002) suggests defining KM as "the explicit and systematic management of vital knowledge and its associated processes of creating, gathering, organizing, diffusion, use and exploitation, in pursuit of organizational objectives" (p. 4). However, this definition of KM is far from being unanimous: the views vary substantially by representatives of different theories and approaches. Traditionally, two major views have been presented in the scholarly literature on KM, namely: the informational resources management (or management of explicit knowledge) and management, which creates the environment in which people could easily develop and share the knowledge while the increasingly serious

Aortic Valve Replacement Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words

Aortic Valve Replacement - Essay Example A., Sauaia, A., Moore, E. E., Haenel, J. B., Burch, J. M., and Lezotte, D. C., 1996) involving multiprofessional medical- nursing work of care (Lederer, J. A., Rodrick, M. L., Mannick, J. A., 1999). As I reflect, I can now arrange the events that were relevant to this patient. On the first admission of the patient from theater to intensive therapy unit, the patient was placed on pressure-control ventilation with 100% oxygen with a PEEP of 10, rate of 12, tidal volume 500, and pressure support of 10. On estimation at that time, arterial blood gas was initially on pH 7.13, pCO2 of 7.0, pO2 of 21.4 with a base excess of -10. SpO2 was 99.8 and bicarbonate 16.9. Lactate was18. The patients in the intensive therapy unit constitute an extremely heterogeneous population in terms of admission diagnosis, co-morbidities, age, race, sex, and socioeconomic conditions, but one feature is common to almost all of them, cardiopulmonary dysfunction (Kelly, J. L. et al., 1997). During my shift hours, I could easily sense that the environment of ITU. It provided highly integrated and coordinated care with many novel machines and minute-to-minute therapy and observation. This posting in the ITU could improve my understanding of the physiology of such patients in that, I could observe the changes in the patient's parameters in real time. I could see the changes in central venous pressure with a change in rate of fluid therapy (Stone, P.W, and Gershon, R.R.M., 2006). I observed changes in blood gases when the oxygen concentration and ventilation settings were changed. I could detect when pharmacotherapeutic interventions would fail to produce intended changes in the cardiac output studies. In short, this...Journal of Trauma; 42: pp. 532-536. Fan, J., Marshall, J. C., Jimenez, M., Shek, P. N., Zagorski, J., and Rotstein, O. D., (1998). Hemorrhagic Shock Primes For Increased Expression Of Cytokine-Induced Neutrophil Chemoattractant In The Lung: Role In Pulmonary Inflammation Following Lipopolysaccharide. Journal of Immunology; 161, pp. 440-447. Gadek, J.E., DeMichele, S.J., Karlstad, M.D., et al., (1999). Effect of enteral feeding with eicosapentaenoic acid, gamma-linolenic acid, and antioxidants in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome. Enteral Nutrition in ARDS Study Group. Critical Care Medicine; 27: pp. 1409-1420. Gibbs, C.R., Davies, M.K., and Lip, G.Y.H., (2000). ABC Of Heart Failure: Management: Digoxin And Other Inotropes, Blockers, And Antiarrhythmic And Antithrombotic Treatment. British Medical Journal; 320: 495. Inman, K.J., Sibbald,W.J., Rutledge,F.S., Speechley,M., Martin,C.M., and Clark, B.J., (1993). Does Implementing Pulse Oximetry In A Critical Care Unit Result In Substantial Arterial Blood Gas Savings Chest; 104: 542. Kelly, J. L., O'Sullivan, C., O'Riordain, M., O'Riordain, D., Lyons, A., Doherty, J., Mannick, J. A., and Rodrick, M. L., (1997). Is Circulating Endotoxin The Trigger For The Systemic Inflammatory Response Syndrome Seen After Injury Annals of Surgery; 225, pp. 530-541. Lu, Z.