Knowledge Management
In an information economy, a company’s greatest asset is the knowledge held and used by it employees—an asset that goes home with them each night. The inability to manage this information has been estimated to cost companies billions of dollars per year.
Past knowledge management efforts have failed because:
* They place too much emphasis on technology rather than on people. Knowledge is in people’s heads. * They separate knowledge management work from real work. Employees don’t want to stop doing their day jobs in order to do their knowledge management jobs. * They place the burden of effort on the producers of knowledge rather than the consumers. The producers have already done their work and don’t want to do more to satisfy something that someone may want someday. * They falsely assume that the information needs of information consumers can be anticipated. The producer has the knowledge and finds it difficult to anticipate how others will later seek it.We can help to deliver effective knowledge management by making sure that these past limitations don’t kill your project. Better tools are available today to reduce the burden on knowledge producers and to capture knowledge that would otherwise remain implicit. We have implemented successful knowledge management systems for our clients, including some that included audio and video files, which we made searchable using our patent pending concept search tool.