Archestra: Managing Knowledge in the Knowledge-based Business

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June 24, 2005

Managing Knowledge in the Knowledge-based Business

Although few businesses immediately think of knowledge management as an extension of ERP, many kinds of enterprises have come to see their captive knowledge as a top-priority "enterprise resource" that must be managed.

The path they've travelled to come to this stance has been as varied as the types of operations they use to gain and hold their market positions. But two approaches stand out quite prominently amongst them all -- the "human capital" approach and the "process improvement" approach. Convergence of the two is increasingly dominant, as big companies rediscover what good small companies never forget: the process works because people bring knowledge to it.

As the well-known stories have put it simply, the rediscovery has often been a surprise:
- a business may have learned the hard way that the most valuable "asset" it has actually walks out the door every night at closing time; worse, a competitor stole a key player whose know-how made them the go-to player.
- the implementation of a great idea dissolved in the face of employee resistance; you can take a horse to water, but you can't make 'im drink...

Lessons learned from those experiences promote knowledge to the top of the list of critical success factors for productivity and value, and emphasize a need for coordinating the management of knowledge assets and change. This idea leaves a lot of details to be figured out, and that means a company has to find a motivation for not just starting it but keeping it up and seeing it through. Hopefully, we then can look at the highly motivated ones for a history of trials and errors that can teach us how it should be done.

When knowledge is actually your main product, could there be any greater motivation? Even so, KM can be elusive. This idea is behind the work of some key business analysts such as Bruce MacEwen, whose blog "Adam Smith, Esquire" routinely examines and advises on the problem of recognizing, planning and leveraging knowledge management opportunities and objectives in law firms. Always attentive to the people issues of KM, Bruce surveys KM evolution in articles such as:

KM, Meet "Peer Production" [my vote for the "must read" group]

Knowledge Management & Uncharted Professional Networks

What KM and Legal Outsourcing Have in Common

and...

Who You Know or What You Know: How About Both?

Try this trick at home.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at June 24, 2005 9:49 AM