Introduction

The Knowledge Economy – Opportunities And Challenges For Business

It is difficult to pinpoint an exact time when the current interest, possibly obsession, with knowledge management took off. Certainly some of the seminal books from management writers began to emerge in the early 1990s. Yet managing knowledge is not a new concept. Professionals, i.e. individuals whose work depends on them making judgments that are grounded in their knowledge base, have always had to manage their knowledge in order to continue practising.

So why has managing knowledge suddenly moved up the strategic agenda for large corporations? What has changed? A number of fairly significant changes have occurred over the past ten to fifteen years. One significant change has been the shift from manufacturing to service-based businesses, where companies are competing to attract and retain more knowledgeable and more discerning global customers. In this environment speed to market has become all-important.

To compete, some organisations have had radically to rethink how to do business. In the IT sector, for example, most of the major manufacturing companies have transformed themselves into services companies, where they now offer ‘total solutions’. In this context knowledge about customers’ businesses, i.e. what their business issues are, what their strategic goals are, is crucial. Of course this information is only of value if the organisation then acts on it, in order to deliver what the customer wants, in a costeffective way, and timely manner, ahead of the competition.

In the race to get a handle on managing knowledge many organisations have come unstuck by investing too much energy in developing formal systems, often IT systems, to facilitate knowledge sharing, at the expense of capitalising on the benefits that come from informal processes.

Organisations have spent millions of pounds on systems to capture, store and improve access to vast quantities of information that is now available, through one source or another, and yet this does not always bring the expected business benefits. I am using the term organisation here as the collective name for its people. As it is people who act on information, not machines, this reinforces the need to focus on mobilising, energising, supporting and enabling individuals at all levels within the organisation to combine their ‘Know of’ and ‘Know how’ to deliver existing services more efficiently, as well as to create new services. Perhaps one of the questions that needs to be asked is can we achieve what we want to achieve without an IT solution? If not, should we not at least ensure that any new system can be integrated with what we already have? What seems to have been overlooked is that knowledge doesn’t always flow from formal structures and systems, but instead is often the by-product of daytoday interactions.