Anchor Glass Container Corporation is the third largest glass manufacturer in the United States. There are eleven plants located throughout the United States and the home office is located here in, Tampa, Florida. There are over 1900 employees. As described above, this company is pretty large, but it is in need of many things. In 1999, Anchor filed for bankruptcy, but was recently given new life when an investment group invested in the company, enabling them to have positive balance sheets for a change. Now that the company has been given a clean bill of health, there are some necessary changes that need to be made and knowledge management will definitely help this organization.
Knowledge Management Overview.
We all know what knowledge is, something that we can learn, but what exactly does knowledge management mean and what does knowledge management do for today's businesses and what is in store for knowledge management in the future. According to TechEncyclopedia, knowledge management is an umbrella term for making more efficient use of the human knowledge that exists within an organization. It is the 21st century equivalent to information management. There are two different categories of knowledge management: tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is described as the knowing-how or embodied knowledge and explicit knowledge is described as the knowing-that or theoretical knowledge. Tacit knowledge is characterized by anyone who acts and makes judgments without reflecting on the rules or principles involved, just plain doing the job, however explicit knowledge is just the opposite. It is characterized by continually accessing knowledge that can be articulated and by learning through instruction and recitation of rules (Barbiero). .
So, the question is why is knowledge management (KM) growing popular more and more each day. The answer is quite simple, to stay competitive and to improve productivity.