ISACA Journal - 2015 Volume 3

Knowledge is recognized as the most important strategic asset of any and every organization. It is very important to identify, capture/acquire, share, reuse and unlearn knowledge. These activities are managed through knowledge management. It is a rather challenging task to evaluate the level of knowledge and knowledge management in an organization. This article seeks to evaluate how the use of COBIT® 5 can enhance the due diligence for knowledge management and knowledge evaluation within the enterprise. Due diligence was conducted on two Slovenian companies using the COBIT 5 framework for knowledge and knowledge management evaluation. The results of the study, presented here, clearly indicate that COBIT 5 can be effectively used as an approach to assess an organization’s knowledge management within due diligence.

The next step beyond data and information is knowledge. 1 Knowledge is considered to be an important resource to maintain the competitiveness of an organization. “In an economy where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge.” 2 For every organization, it is important to know how to identify knowledge and how to share it. One challenge is determining how to identify the level of knowledge and evaluate the level of knowledge management. COBIT 5 has stepped forward to help solve this issue, with its inclusion of process BAI08 Manage knowledge. Together with process APO07 Manage human resources, these processes provide a sufficient basis for knowledge and knowledge management evaluation.

Is it feasible to measure knowledge, knowledge sharing and knowledge management within the organization using the COBIT 5 framework?

WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?

“Knowledge is the currency of the current economy, a vital organizational asset and a key to creating a sustainable competitive advantage,” 3

according to Mohamed Ragab and Amr Arisha.

Knowledge is epistemologically classified in two dimensions—tacit and explicit—and from an organization’s perspective, has two distinct goals: generate knowledge and apply knowledge.

Author Michael Polanyi defines tacit knowledge as personal, context-specific and, thus, not easily visible and expressible, nor easy to formalize and communicate to others. 4 Professor Levy vividly described tacit knowledge, as “What someone has between the ears.” 5 On the other hand, Polanyi refers to explicit knowledge as being transmittable in some systematic language such as words, numbers, diagrams or models.

Sharing knowledge can help an organization achieve better organizational performance through the implementation of new ideas, processes, products and/or services. The need to measure knowledge resources within the organization has, therefore, emerged as a key area of interest for researchers and practitioners within the knowledge management domain.

MANAGING KNOWLEDGE

One of the simplest definitions of knowledge management is the “conscious strategy of getting the right knowledge to the right people at the right time and helping people share and put information into action in ways that strive to improve organizational performance.” 6

Today, information and communications technology (ICT) plays an important role in major competitive organizations, and several papers refer to the role of ICT in knowledge management. Some argue that the measurement of knowledge is one of the most difficult knowledge management activities. 7 There are different frameworks and methodologies to measure knowledge and knowledge management.

COBIT 5 AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

When it was issued in 2012, one of many improvements in COBIT 5 was BAI08. The process’s description is “Maintain the availability

Bostjan Delak, Ph.D., CISA, CIS, is an assistant professor on several faculties in Slovenia and senior consultant for IS advisory and IS audit at ITAD, Technology Park Ljubljana, Slovenia.