Knowledge Management in IAKM

Knowledge management is a discipline that takes a comprehensive, systematic approach to the information assets of an organization by identifying, capturing, collecting, organizing, indexing, storing, integrating, retrieving and sharing them. Such assets include intellectual capital, employee expertise, business and competitive intelligence, and organizational memory. It strives to make the collective knowledge, information and experiences of the organization available to individual employees or organizational groups for their use and to motivate them to contribute their knowledge to the collective assets. It seeks to create or identify communities of practice or interest, especially to identify lesson learned and best practices.

Knowledge Management versus MBA
Knowledge Management takes a comprehensive approach to the knowledge and information assets of an organization. It includes intellectual capital, such as an employee's expertise and customers' knowledge as part of an organization's assets and part of its balance sheet. Informal knowledge, such as employees' know-how, is lost with employee reductions, turnover or retirement. It must be anticipated and replaced with formal knowledge that allows for easy management of these intellectual assets. Traditional Master's programs in Business do not teach the skills required for managing intellectual capital and tacit knowledge. Furthermore, they do not teach knowledge organization methodologies, collaboration modalities, enterprise content management or document engineering that make the organization efficient, effective, innovative and competitive. There is the need to capitalize on what an organization collectively knows and a need to manage complexity, not only the internal dynamics of the organization, but in its ability to cope with governmental requirements at all levels and other environmental changes.

Our KM Program Will Offer Courses in Topics Such As:
• Ontologies, Thesauri and Knowledge Discovery
• Business Process Management
• KM Successes and Failures: Best Practices and Lessons Learned
• Intellectual Capital, Assets and Valuation
• Collaboration Strategies and Technologies for Knowledge Sharing
• Knowledge Management, Innovation and Creativity
• Metadata Management and Information Architectures
• Intelligent Complex Adaptive Systems
• Business Intelligence, Competitive Intelligence and Knowledge Management
• Knowledge Discovery through Data and Information Mining
• Visionary Leadership for Knowledge Managers
• Knowledge Management and Learning Organizations
• Strategic Knowledge Management (Communities-of-Practice and Communities-of-Interest)

Studying KM in IAKM
There are several ways to study knowledge management in IAKM. Students may choose to undertake the Master of Science Degree (42 credit hours), the Certificate in Knowledge Management (18 credit hours), or take individual courses for continuing education as non degree students. Those who are interested in taking individual courses as they become available may enroll in Kent State University as non-degree students. Please contact Janna Korzenko at 330-672-5841 for more information about any of these options.

Additional Resources
For more information on KM, browse collected KM Resources, relevant Professional Organizations and Potential Employers for KM graduates.