Introduction to KM

0:27 Hello learners, welcome back to the course on AI in human resource management. Today, we move to the last lecture of Module 10, where we'll be discussing AI-mediated knowledge management. Now, as someone who has been working in the research area of knowledge management for at least the last eight to nine years, I see that knowledge management is one of the most critical aspects of ensuring the sustainability of an organization. So, if you look into knowledge management studies in general—in any of the indices, be it Scopus, Web of Science, or any particular index—you will see that 95% of the studies have focused on knowledge sharing.

0:59 But there is a critical aspect of knowledge hiding, which has been my research area. And I'm always quite vocal about this particular issue of knowledge hiding. We have discussed this in the Organizational Behavior course and on the NPTEL platform as well. But when you look into the behavioral side of knowledge hiding specifically, we see that there are different ways people exhibit knowledge hiding. There are many ways—some of which are empirically proven—such as playing dumb, evasive hiding, rationalized hiding.

1:27 Sometimes, people go further and engage in counter-questioning. All these strategies are related to knowledge hiding. Now, why I wanted to mention this is that when you talk about knowledge management, people generally focus only on knowledge sharing, but there are inherent motives behind knowledge hiding. And there is a persistent practice of knowledge hiding occurring in every single organization. If you look into your organization—assuming you are associated with one—you will definitely notice some level of knowledge hiding. There is some level of knowledge hiding happening.

1:57 So when you are talking about knowledge management, the importance lies in actually facilitating the knowledge sharing. When you look into AI or bring AI into knowledge management or AI mediated knowledge management, see that AI is facilitating the discovery, knowledge discovery part. It is facilitating the knowledge preservation part. It is facilitating the knowledge retention part. So all these aspects are typically being enhanced or facilitated by AI. And let's look into that in greater detail. I'm Dr. Abraham Cyril Issac.

2:57 I'm an assistant professor at the School of Business, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. Now, when you think about knowledge management per se, Many a time what happens is that we see that, okay, it's our colleague. Why not? They will share the knowledge with me. But many a time we see that even your closest colleagues, even your closest co-employees, co-workers, they will tend to hide useful knowledge with you. Because they might feel that this is, you know, n number of reasons, one could be, they might not feel it necessary to share it at this point in time.

3:29 Or maybe they feel that if I share this, he or she is going to take undue advantage of that and get above me. Or there might also be a possibility where they might think that, okay, if I have struggled this much to obtain this piece of information or this piece of knowledge, why can't they work hard? Let them also put their foot. So there are many possibilities, many schools of thought that can come into play when people try to share knowledge.

4:02 And this is essentially what prevents knowledge sharing from happening. One step ahead, I'll go and also mention the possibility of institutional memory. Please note, when an individual leaves the organization, there is a chance that whatever knowledge he or she has gained within that organization will also leave with them. So when you look into such situations, A person coming in to replace them or take up the position might not be able to acquire that particular knowledge, which otherwise should have been there—what we call in OB research, organizational behavior research, as institutional memory.

4:30 Had the institutional memory been intact, The person could have just come in and used it or employed it wherever necessary. So this certainly underscores the relative importance of knowledge management in that introductory background. Let's understand knowledge management, specifically AI-mediated knowledge management. So in this lecture, I will explore the different facets, from knowledge discovery to knowledge preservation and retention, based on AI. So let's understand the relevance of knowledge management and AI. When you look specifically at knowledge management, it is