The aim of this study is to identify the applications to be used for personal knowledge management, determine their area of use, and specify and analyze the examples obtained for their use at administrative levels in corporations. Within this framework, this study includes the assessment of the work flow of a top manager with the required experience and professionalism in the field of knowledge management. Besides the literature review conducted in line with the content of the subject area in this study, applications that enable personal knowledge management in particular and the similarities between these applications and the features of their social media networks were detected, and their specific purpose of use was clarified. Evernote, chosen as a sample application to be used at corporations, following personal knowledge management, has been assessed within the framework of managers' experiences with the use of depth interview technique.
TopIntroduction
We have been provided with numerous alternatives to make use of knowledge and time efficiently, and to take advantage of opportunities offered by new technologies in the field of knowledge management in an orderly and organized manner in new work environments where time is an important and valuable resource. Individual blogs, micro-blogs, cooperative platforms, content sharing networks, social labeling networks, and text-sound-video-conference sharing devices are some of the numerous examples for the use of social media applications in the field of knowledge management.
These applications that kick in when human mind is not enough seem to undertake a great variety of responsibilities to compensate the drawbacks that are faced with in daily lives as it is impossible to catch up with the speed of the 21st century. Seen from an optimistic angle based on their “facilitating” aspects, these applications have already taken their places in daily life as inevitable applications especially for managers who are in need of reaching them anytime and anywhere even though these applications are sometimes criticized for being too mechanic.
These applications that provide the chance to benefit from in mobiles phones, tablets and notebook computers transfer the past habit of diary keeping to digital environments, through which they have in a sense become the confidants and the most important assistants of modern human beings.
These applications provide us with voice and video note-taking, the possibility to store articles and different internet content with the purpose of reaching them later, making to-do lists, defining business processes and using them from a single point, and ensuring document management. They, in fact, describe the establishment of a new life style based on the ties set up by modern technological humans with the digital world.
The successful adaptation of social media networks and applications with similar features to each daily activity in human life involves the essential fact that they are accessible any time and distributable through storing knowledge from far away by the use of cloud technology.
Today, every organization ranging from state institutions to companies and small-scale businesses seem to comprehend the significance of the use of new technologies and social media for strategically-conducted corporate communication studies and public relations activities. Therefore, it is observed that a dialogue is possible with the target audience in such organizations, and a democratic management mentality, which is open to contribution, has become widespread (Macnamara & Zerfass, 2012).
In a traditional sense, knowledge management systems that carry out the function of constituting knowledge indices and networks, sharing documents and personalization of such knowledge in a central knowledge store (Parise, 2009) have experienced a transformation from individualism to institutionalism via new Internet technologies and social media applications.
The source of change in knowledge management involves important effects of the rich content of social networks in terms of social, organizational and personal knowledge activities and the use of social navigation in setting the related individual links
One of the most important features of social media applications is that they can classify individual content in terms of interests, roles, relationships and activities via formal headings (Parise, 2009).
As web-based knowledge and the transfer of such knowledge within the same environment is possible in our age, it is necessary to develop a viewpoint on how we are perceived in terms of personal and professional aspects. The way we communicate in these networks where we develop an personal knowledge management in a sense, and the sources that we keep in touch with have formed the essential elements of knowledge management (Pfeiffer & Tonkin, 2012). This new stage of personal knowledge management has also reshaped the administrative styles of managers within the context of innovations in the field of corporations. Social media and many applications with similar characteristics to social media have not only facilitated personal knowledge access but also provided advantages for knowledge management, which encourages many corporations to use these applications in administrative level.