knowledge management systems.

when i am working on knowledge management systems .
i met with some questions like
what is this km systems exactly?
what is the need of km systems?
how km systems?
this is my view .
Knowledge Management systems are the systems which help the individuals of an organization to collect,access,apply and coordinate the already existing knowledge or otherwise re-use within the organization for the better profits .so these kms are basically developed to support processes,tasks in an organisation .they are develop to support processes like identification and capturing of knowledge , linking and distributing of knowledge etc.
now y km systems? i felt main advantage with this is we can avoid re discovering the knowledge.because rediscovering is the costly process than the re usage .one will have to start again from the level zero in rediscovering organisation ,where as in re using it will allow people or employees to use already existing knowledge.this will help both individuals and organizations a lot.for example when a manager or expert leaving a organisation,he/she knows different aspect of that particular company depending upon his/her hierarchy one who comes into his/her role should know how to deal with those aspects,he cant start from the level zero,this will lead to the loss to the company or an organisation,to solve these type of problems many organisations adopt knowledge management systems.in above scenario if that particular organization have km systems the knowledge of the manager who is leaving will be shared to the person who is new to that role,so that he can deal with the queries or the issues quickly and accurately than in rediscovering knowledge situation. In large organisations like a big it companies there will be different individuals or in groups work on different processes,they don;t know the knowledge of other process and we don't know what other people know in our organisation.so developing a km systems will help each one to share information when they needed effectively by capturing and sharing information through knowledge base.for example the person who working on a technical part of software project will not have idea on functional part.so he search for the expertise of that particular functional consultant or expertise in a knowledge base and gain or share knowledge with that person directly or through knowledge base.this will take less time and will b more profitable for the organisation.
how?
each and every organisation have different approach to knowledge management systems.a km system could be any thing like document based ones like lotus notes,web etc or AI technologies which use a customized representation to solve the problems,or the social computing which will include blogs,social network services like face book,orkut etc,intra nets, group ware, web logs,and instant messaging, content management systems and email in both individual and organizational contexts. so these are the ways in which km systems are used for the growth of both individual and organisation.