The KM Opportunity

Knowledge Management is about connecting people to people and people to information to create competitive advantage.

The intersection, or sweet spot, of these connections is where creativity spawns innovation and thus establishes competitive advantage. This is referred to as connectedness, and accomplished through what I have come to call Community-based Knowledge Management.

The Opportunity
In today’s competitive business environment, many organizations are struggling to meet or keep up with the demands put upon them by their customers, competitors, investors, and regulators. With the globalization of business, no organization is immune to this pressure. Organizations that excel at leveraging their know-how in a systematic way will create and sustain a competitive advantage that will exceed the current and future demands placed upon them.

It is important to take a pragmatic approach to creating a Knowledge Management strategy, corresponding architecture, and deploying effective knowledge systems. Key to leveraging the knowledge of an organization is providing insight, thought leadership and context to those who have the most at stake in generating and using organizational knowledge. In order to generate this pragmatic strategy, it is important to provide a framework for the discussion.

Knowledge Management will create sustainable competitive advantage for organizations if approached in the appropriate manner. Knowledge Management is not a single program or series of programs or projects, but the synthesis of core business processes that should permeate every aspect of an organization. This is not to say that individual initiatives should be shunned in order to build "enterprise" systems, but systems should be built to meet the needs of the entire organization.

A holistic approach to managing the knowledge of an organization is also critical to the value proposition. The holistic vision encompasses the creation of a Knowledge Management strategy and architecture that synchronizes with the organizations mission and strategy, and development of an appropriate mindset that creates cultural norms – trust, sharing, common goals, caring, lust for learning, and acceptance of change – that permeates ever aspect of the organization. A holistic approach to Knowledge Management also includes thinking in terms of the importance of stakeholder value, not just stockholder value, and rewarding those stakeholders who put their own human capital at risk to make an organization succeed. By leveraging organizational knowledge, organizations can dramatically improve their ability to compete and provide products or services that generate the greatest return on investment.