Environmental Knowledge Management - Recent Advances and Issues in Environmental Science - page 45

as including any processes and practices that are concerned with the creation, acqui-
sition, capture, sharing and use of knowledge, skills and expertise. The key purpose
of an enterprise KM is to make information and knowledge accessible, reusable and
sharable [21] and concerns the harnessing of the intellectual assets of an organization
in order to improve its learning capability [22].
In general, KM is the collection, integration and classifi cation of disordered infor-
mation, technology and expertise in an enterprise and provides systematic and orga-
nized information for internal employees or management-level staff to consult when
undertaking new tasks and decision-making.
The KM is a kind of enterprise asset that can help an organization to create new
technology and achieve specifi c outcomes such as shared intelligence, improved per-
formance or competitive advantage.
The question of how to gain control of knowledge assets has become a major or-
ganizational concern [16, 22]. Knowledge and expertise have been viewed as the most
strategic and effi cient inputs for an enterprise in the quest to achieve a sustainable
competitive advantage [23]. The KM represents a new science and technology that
provides competitive conditions and advantages for the modern business [24].
Moreover, Sarvary [24] also stated that with a good KM system, the job is much
more challenging and people can concentrate on problem solving rather than on num-
ber crunching and data collection. Effective KM has a great impact throughout the
enterprises from the lower levels of manufacturing to the management levels of stra-
tegic decision-making. Hence, through the effi cient management of knowledge, an
enterprise can create new technology and a unique business strategy that will improve
its performance and competitive advantage.
ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Environmental Knowledge and Environmental Knowledge Management
The ideas of the sustainable development as introduced in the Brundant report [25]
have being become increasingly important. Achieving sustainable development to
combine EM and KM are an indispensable ingredient. Wagner [26] found that for
firms with pollution prevention-oriented corporate environmental strategies, the re-
lationship between environmental and economic performance is more positive thus
making improvements in corporate sustainability are more likely. However, it is a
quite new issue pertaining to how to combine KM with EM and apply them into real
situation. Nonaka et al. [27] defined tacit knowledge as a kind of personal character-
istic that is too abstract to transfer or even express using words. Howells [28] thought
that tacit knowledge is a kind of expertise that is not editable. This knowledge is ob-
tained through informal learning behavior and a sequence process.
Therefore, EKM must combine the management of explicit knowledge and tacit
KM in an organization and control the environmental impact via the accumulation,
utilization, sharing and creation of environmental knowledge.
Environmental knowledge is a kind of general knowledge and includes the con-
cepts of environmental protection, the natural environment and ecosystems [29].