Human Resources and Knowledge Management

The terms ‘human resource management’ (HRM) and ‘human resources’ (HR) have largely replaced the term ‘personnel management’ as a description of the processes involved in managing people in organizations. Human Resource (HR) management deals with the design of formal systems in an organization to ensure the effective and efficient use of human talent to accomplish organizational goals. In an organization, the management of human resources means that they must be recruited, compensated, trained, and developed. In recent years, the meaning of the term knowledge management has been debated, defined, and redefined repeatedly. In general knowledge management can be taken as the tools, techniques, and strategies to retain, analyze, organize, improve, and share business expertise. Human resource management can make an important contribution to knowledge management simply because knowledge is shared between people; it is not just a matter of capturing explicit knowledge through the use of information technology. From this point of view the role of human resource management is to ensure that the organization has the intellectual capital it needs.This paper looks at some of the ways in which HR can revise its own systems and practices to ensure that they have a knowledge focus and reinforce the organisation’s overall knowledge management goals.