فصلنامه راهبرد دفاعی
پیاپی 16 (تابستان 1386)

The recent remarkable trends in the area of software and hardware technologies have led to acceleration of the movement of mankind societies towards “knowledge oriented societies”, to the extent that all aspects of development of the societies are described with “knowledge oriented”. These huge and rapid developments have affected in turn the defense section and technology. For instance, production of light and smart military products has been possible due to these developments and so the relevant management techniques and software technologies are being sophisticated. In order to go along with these developments and acquiring defense capabilities, the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran should consider management of defense knowledge and cope with the challenges of nowadays-turbulent environment. Therefore, the paper explores very important functions of knowledge management and also areas of action by defense section in this regard.

The trends are indicating that “production based” societies and organizations are newly substituted by “knowledge based” societies and organizations. The main concern for them is generating and securing strategic knowledge which can distinct them from their competing societies and organizations. In this context, management of defense knowledge, as a new reading of property management, is of special significance. Therefore, the article attempts to show the necessity of considering knowledge management in the armed forces by exploring defense knowledge and so management of defense knowledge and Inukshuk, a new model for knowledge management. Finally, developing of the strategy for management of defense knowledge and planning for and founding of the relevant responsible institution are mentioned as the two major steps towards management of defense knowledge within the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

As all elements and aspects of knowledge are not documented in an organization, in order to change tacit knowledge to Explicitknowledge it is needed to utilize knowledge management. This is necessary for defense organizations as learning organizations too. During the recent years, in order to accelerate the development of the Information Technology and to help the operation of command headquarters, which use IT and the relevant capabilities, military knowledge management has been used. In this paper, the authors discuss the process, circle and relevant concepts of knowledge management and review the role of knowledge and its main function in strengthening and steering of military organizations.

The trend of promoting the role of knowledge, innovation and new technologies and so the importance of values of sources of knowledge in running of pioneer organizations has caused the placement of knowledge management in the strategic core of organization. However, due to knowledge and technology based feature of the new wars, the matter of knowledge management is of special importance for defense organizations. Therefore, this paper intends to survey the meaning of knowledge management and its unknown aspects and also to review the main effective elements of this new discipline. And finally it concludes with introduction of special approaches towards the improvement of knowledge management within organization.

Knowledge management is a systematic process of finding, selecting, organizing and providing knowledge, which assists an organization to achieve the needed vision, and understanding from its own experience. Furthermore, it not only helps to solving problems, decision making, strategic planning and dynamic learning, but also it prevents depletion of subjective assets, increases organizational consciousness as well as flexibility of the organization. Along with the introduction of knowledge, this paper surveys the framework of knowledge management and the ways of transferring knowledge. It continues with discussing the role of information in organization, the way of transferring information and executive knowledge in several phases of generating a given product. Also, the way of participation of research, planning, production and marketing sections are discussed together with the best way of transferring of knowledge in this paper.