We talk a lot about Domain Knowledge Management which is no doubt, very crucial for any niche industry. But, have we even considered Company Knowledge Management, which has become critical to get success in today’s knowledge economy. In this blog, we will see how this can immediately reduce the high costs of continually ‘reinventing of the wheel’ and repeating the similar mistakes.
Lets define this more precisely, Company Knowledge Management is a discipline to help individuals, groups, workforce and the whole Organisation to better capture new ideas and insights, learning, store, share, collectively and systematically create and apply the best knowledge, to achieve the objectives.
We assume here company as organisation, so it also means Organisational Knowledge Management. This Company Knowledge Management ensures that organisations continually learn and turn lessons identified into new actions and behaviors, and new collective knowledge can be shared across the entire organisation. This helps in applying the best knowledge available to the organisation, at all times; which can dramatically reduce costs, improve response times, result in better decision making, improve quality and increase productivity.
The fact that the companies succeed, need some of the basic principles of knowledge management and knowledge asset management to be embedded in the organisation and embodied in the people. Organisations will succeed to the degree that the Strategies are aligned to the principles.
The question arises here which is often asked as well, is Company Knowledge Management just for large Organisations? We would say – Definitely not! Small Business Knowledge Management is just as critical!
The main difference is that large Organisations can gain much benefit from bringing together fragmented knowledge from across their operations, whereas Small Business Knowledge Management is more concerned with creating and applying knowledge faster. In other words, the large Organisation first asks ‘What do we know across the Organisation and who knows?’ The small Organisation first asks ‘What new knowledge can we create and turn into innovative products and services faster?’
The other key benefit of Small Business Knowledge Management is that it ensures the company has the necessary knowledge management structures in place before it becomes larger to better ensure that it does not create fragmented knowledge later. Our experience has also revealed that small businesses are just as prone to expensive ‘reinventing of the wheel’ and costly repeating of the same mistakes. Even small teams do not reuse current knowledge as well as they should.
Author: Xaltius
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