the knowledgeable enterprise

8/14/2019 The Knowledgeable Enterprise

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The Knowledgeable Enterprise

A large percentage of professional staff employed by business entities can becollectively labeled as Knowledge Workers. These include professionals who

need specific know-how and relevant information to perform their duties.

Whenever a job description lays down requirements for a specific degree,

academic achievement, official coursework, membership, background, or

experience in a similar position, this is a job description for a Knowledge

Worker.

This is in contrast to jobs that require skills only where you would normally

see requirements for a pre-placement training course, a period of in-house

apprenticeship, or a probation period, regardless of previous status. Such

jobs are usually open to any willing candidate and you could expect the

duties to be manual, repetitive, or based on manual dexterity, endurance,

etc.

Knowledge Workers get paid. With time, the investment made in these

professionals should result in net profit for their employer. However, most

business entities fail to turn them into a financially valuable asset; rather,

they are looked upon as expenses, not an investment. They appear

traditionally on the expense side of the Profit Statement.

When accounting takes into consideration the legal implications of staff

contracts and pension plans, these are stated under liabilities. In our

experience, they seldom materialize on the other side as assets.

In traditional accounting, however, they can (and should). Investing in

knowledgeable staff results in boosting the goodwill of the entity, can be

transformed into patents and similar intangible assets, and eventually result

in measurable growth of working capital. Transforming employees into other

measurable forms of capital resulted in the notion of ‘Human Capital’ as

opposed to ‘Human Resources’.

In any given industry, some entities resolve to invest in their employees and

thus become key employers; leaders of their job market. Eventually, theirability to recruit and retain the most knowledgeable professionals leads to

their rise in the industry. They become market leaders.

The way to become a market leader is to understand that the key to growth

is to grow beyond the limits of ‘here’ and ‘now’. The best advice to give any

growing business is to keep looking ahead. When dealing with professionals,

this translates into: enhancing their current know-how; encouraging their own



aspirations to grow; and eventually growing their collective knowledge into

the ‘as yet unknown’ (whatever the future may bring).

It is this openness to the future that separates mediocre business entities

from those that eventually lead their industries and become global players;

the willingness and desire to be innovative through the relentless growth of knowledge.

Knowledge Management, as a practical discipline, aims to formalize this view

and emphasize the principles that fuel business entities to grow beyond

conventional constrains. If growth beyond a certain threshold is held back by

market size, competition, investment, logistics, or technical limits of

feasibility, these can be overcome only by expanding the knowledge of today

with what a business can develop tomorrow.

A knowledge consultant does not aim to revamp a business in terms of

industry-specific approaches, but rather empower professionals to develop

their own ideas and activities with fresh ideas and innovative solutions. To

achieve this, the consultant will introduce methods of knowledge collection,

compilation, and dissemination to guarantee that professionals have at their

disposal the latest and most informative know-how available. Next, he/she

will invite and enable enrichment of the knowledge base with constant input

from the team. Ultimately, he/she will establish protocols that ensure that

team members make good use of the existing knowledge and that high

standards of quality (clarity, accuracy, reliability, etc) are maintained.

This being said, the benefits to be gained will take place in stages:

First, the feeling of improvement and moving forward should be felt

internally. Staff should feel better informed, appreciated, and empowered.

The boost to morale and internal loyalty should be felt early on. Performance

drops, workplace apathy, and change resistance should all be seen to fall.

Second, career development of staff should reflect on recruitment and

retention figures. Performance and efficiency improvements should be

detectable on Key Performance Indicators and industry-specific metrics. Both

will lead to a stronger corporate identity and more respectable image when

seen by outsiders, particularly clients and business partners.

Third, on the long run, increase in competitiveness will raise the market share

of the enterprise as a whole. When this reaches existing limits of growth, the

final and most significant benefit will materialize; the innovation inherent in

the system will expand the market vertically and horizontally, create new

needs and new opportunities, and generate new revenue through the

position of leadership itself.



"Knowledge management is a conscious strategy for moving the right knowledge to the

right people at the right time to assist sharing and enabling the information to be

translated into action to improve the organizational performance." (O'Dell & Grayson 1997)

the knowledgeable enterprise

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