Mr Nicodemus Maingi, a lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology (FIT) presented a paper at Polytechnic of Namibia (Namibia's University of Science and Technology) 5th international conference in Windhoek. The theme of the conference held on 24th and 25th October was entrepreneurship and emerging economies.

Mr Maingi's paper was titled "Knowledge Management in a competitive economy: the Knowledge Management Readiness Score (KMRS)". Knowledge Management is the process of creating value from an organization's intangible assets such human, structural and customer capital.

Why knowledge management? With the advent of office automation, many organizations computerized their operations and there was a improvement in terms of organizational efficiency, accuracy and better ways of producing and managing important information that sped up decision-making.

Over time, the amount of data generated by the organizational activities grew so much to the extent that backups and archives became a common thing.
In many of these organizations' archives lies a gold mine of data. If these data could be retrieved, analyzed and documented, it could steer such organizations to new competitive positions in their respective industries.

The challenge is how to get all these vast amounts of data and information analyzed meaningfully to the advantage of the concerned organizations. This challenge ushered in the knowledge age. Thus came knowledge management.

Knowledge discovery and data mining techniques are key to knowledge management. But while the idea of knowledge management is great and seems the natural way to go for many organizations, there is a lack of know-how and expertise to start the process and manage it. Mr Maingi's paper includes knowledge management readiness scores of various organizations in Kenya based on a survey he carried out.

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