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Home > Businesses > Knowledge in the Enterprise (1)
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Knowledge in the Enterprise (1)
Features of the enterprise knowledge
All our courses have been
transferred to Knowledge Management International
University
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Furthermore, the
development of new products and services to a large extent depends on knowledge
(integrated, also) on consumers and clients, on new scientific discoveries, on new
technologies, on marketing, etc. |
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Nowadays,
the stress to apply knowledge in the enterprise to create
competitive advantages, becomes even more stressing, due to the following
factors:
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The
ever growing market competitiveness. |
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Companies are organizing their businesses and orienting their efforts in order to improve
their products and services to better satisfy its clients. |
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The administrative personnel functions are being reduced, and also the
administrative personnel. There is, effectively, the need to replace the informal way in
which knowledge has been managed, inside the "administrative" functions, with formal
knowledge management methods, regarding client oriented tasks. |
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The pressure of competence leads to reduce the quantity of employees that possess
company knowledge. |
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Time is necessary to acquire knowledge, and to extract experience from
it; but employees have always less time to do it. |
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The tendency to employee mobility is always growing, inside the company
and between companies, and tends to become independent, and that creates knowledge loss or
dispersion. |
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Often there's the need to manage growing complexity even in small
companies, and with transnational operations. |
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Changes in strategic company management
may cause knowledge losses in a
specific area. A successive decision to retake the previous orientation might require this
knowledge, but the employee that possesses it might not be in the company anymore. |
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There's also the problem of finding the necessary cognitive capital, and afterwards to be able to use it in an efficient manner, with an appropriate cost/profit.
To correctly manage the difficulties associated to knowledge
management and administration, companies need:
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To have a uniform and standardized language
for the whole company, that
guarantees knowledge circulation and that it be correctly understood. |
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To be able to identify, model and represent knowledge explicitly. |
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Be able to share and reuse
its own knowledge in several applications,
through different internal users. This implies sharing existing knowledge sources and even
those that will be found in the future. |
Some methods and tools, that use
approaches derived from knowledge engineering, enable already for a long time to
efficiently
solve problems using knowledge in the enterprise.
These methods offer
detailed procedures to
project and construct knowledge based applications. There are other tools
that may help to capture, model and assess new knowledge,
and to verify and maintain old knowledge, to develop the applications
necessary to the company.
Anyway, the most recent techniques for knowledge
modeling and to encourage its use, together with more traditional techniques for its
management, stand for a good starting
point for the knowledge management in the company. |
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Elements for a strategy of knowledge management in the company
Whichever new tactic or strategy for
knowledge management would have to comprise – and to assimilate well - at least the
following aspects.
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Knowledge is an active
quality, but its concrete
management requires conspicuous economical investments under some other patrimonial issues.
Most knowledge management specific activities require investments and efforts, as for
instance: |
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To capture knowledge (for instance, the creation of a
knowledge base, and its integration into an
automated system).
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Adding value to knowledge (with information adequacies, updates, compression and
packing).
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Developing methods to categorize knowledge and to categorize new cognitive
contributions.
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Developing necessary infrastructure and technological applications for company wide
knowledge sharing.
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Educating employees in the creation, use and methods of knowledge sharing.
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Some companies consider opportune to spend 7-10% of its
income in company knowledge management. It is clear that this peculiar
management has a cost, but the first, instinctive reaction to such evaluations could be of
skepticism about the need or opportunity of this investment. But another
necessary reflection is: What is the cost of ignorance??... How much does it cost to a company forgetting that what
their employees know, not knowing how to answer a client rapidly, or taking a wrong
decision based on insufficient or distorted knowledge?
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Knowledge management renders more profits starting from maps rather than from models,
more starting from the market than from directives. |
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Between
technology and knowledge
there is a substantial difference, that
often passes unobserved, but it
is evidenced in its management organization:
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Technology management is based on the fact
that technology becomes obsolete very fast and therefore it must be replaced, which
implies that what has been learnt in the past must be simply left behind, replaced by new
developments.
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Knowledge
management instead, expects to
maintain and reuse the acquired knowledge, considering knowledge as a permanent construction
in which every new information is integrated with the previous one, and modifies it, and
therefore nothing becomes really obsolete, if it is integrated with
the new.
If company executives focused this knowledge aspect at their best,
they could use even technology acquisitions as enterprise learning processes,
and would be more prone to assign consistent budgets to the
professional update and development of their workers,
and in exchange would obtain
higher productivity.
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 Project management with knowledge management tools
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