Managing Communications, Knowledge and Information Essay

Managing Communications, Knowledge and Information - Essay Example Knowledge management and information flows within organizations form a critical link to its productivity and performance. However, effective knowledge management practices remain a distinctive challenge for organizations in the form of identifying the key information needs of the organization and developing effective systems for channelising the information flow across departments and business units. How does an organization define the need for knowledge and skills among its employees and what are the measures that it takes to equip the workforce with the desired skills? How can strategic planning in identifying information needs within each department or operational processes in the business and how can this help in meeting the organizational goals and objectives? These are some of the pertinent questions facing organizations and this paper focuses on providing an insight into strategies that can be adopted by an organization to meet its information needs and overall business object ives. The paper analyses the information needs and knowledge management strategies taken by Apple to meet one of its business objectives. On 22 August 2008, Apple launched the I-phone in India. The response they received from consumers was not as expected as hardly any consumers showed up. This was a bit disappointing as compared to the launches in other countries where there were thousands of consumers standing outside the stores to get their I-phones. It was identified that the lack of marketing led to not having enough consumers at the launch date. (Iphone in India, 2011) The graph below shows the Mac market share of Apple: Market share of Apple by geographic divisions (Source: OSXDaily, 2011) By looking at the above graph, we can see that the market share in Asia is 1.61%, out of which about half is China and the rest is India. Considering the population size, it may not seem as low but as compared to other continents, it is considerably low. With