BOTH INSIDE AND OUTSIDE A company's gates, great things often begin at those fortunate moments when people with knowledge and vision pool their dreams. A perfect example: WorldCom Inc., the company that merged with MCI to form MCI WorldCom Inc., now the fourth-largest telecommunications company in the world, had its origins at a coffee shop in Hattiesburg, Miss., when four executives who knew the business got together exactly one month after AT&T Corp.'s long-distance monopoly was broken by antitrust laws. Luck or knowledge?
Of course, businesspeople can meet by design at regular times and places, but the spontaneous appearance of a group that can develop a shared vision has historically been the product of a chance meeting on the stairs, on the elevator, by the coffee machine or at the water cooler. Knowledge management proponents today believe that those chance interactions that mix and reformulate knowledge can and should be systematically encouraged. It can happen in one office, but time and geography are no longer constraints to collaborative work (see "Tool Box,"). The creation of a profitable idea?like MCI WorldCom?always takes hard work but is never just dumb luck. Larry Prusak, executive director of IBM Corp.'s Institute for Knowledge Management in Waltham, Mass., says, "All of life and business is a game of odds. Just as HR policies increase the odds of employee retention, and good customer service increases the odds toward repeat business, knowledge management is about increasing the odds toward knowledge being transferred, utilized and [contributing to] innovation."
Knowledge, the most important asset in any company, is the key to survival in the Information Age. Yet companies are stumped on how to manage something that cannot be quantified, let alone universally defined.
When it comes to mixing and remixing people's knowledge, executives know what they want to have happen; they just don't know how to make it happen.
A 1997 report from the Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation in Cambridge, Mass., and Business Intelligence Ltd. in London revealed that 94 percent of 431 organizations surveyed in Europe and the United States have executives who believe "it would be possible, through more deliberate management, to leverage the knowledge existing in [their organizations] to a higher degree." Yet, while there's a lot of faith in the concept of knowledge management, 71 percent of those same executives rated their businesses as average or worse at "embedding knowledge in processes, products and/or services." Knowledge management will remain an elusive goal until companies overcome the barriers?both organizational and otherwise?to instituting it.
While the severity of the obstacles to adopting effective knowledge management practices depends on how knowledge-intensive an organization is (a software company ranks high on the knowledge scale, for example, and views knowledge as a key differentiator), there are common sticking points to getting started. (For examples of how some companies are managing knowledge, see the tales throughout this story.) CIOs charged with a knowledge management project can benefit by carefully assessing the four areas discussed here that traditionally present challenges to any knowledge management effort.
Farrukh Ali Khan
Final Year Student
Bs(cs) Comp Sc Department
Karachi University
