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The evidence is clear that to survive and succeed, enterprises must
change their approaches to conduct successful business in the globalized
economy. Whereas gradual change has always been required
to adapt to new conditions, the pace is now accelerating and incremental
change is no longer sufficient. There are many reasons behind
the needs to change.
1. Work is becoming more complex resulting from
— Continued efforts and advances to streamline business and
automate routine tasks.
— Increased demands to create and deliver better and more
competitive products and services.
— Greater sophistication of management and operating practices
that require new approaches.
Increased work complexity necessitates that people must be
better prepared and support systems that must be better suited
to handle new tasks with proper competence. In particular:
— People need to possess —or have access to —work-domain
knowledge and metaknowledge with higher competitive
quality, thereby allowing them to deliver complex work
with the necessary degree of proficiency.
— Support systems must be better integrated with business
(and other systems) and must be smarter by increased
application of artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced
methods. These changes will improve the quality of current
information services. More importantly, they will lead to
increased offloading of intellectual work for people by
automating simple reasoning tasks.
It is realized that most work is increasingly knowledge intensive—
requiring expertise to deliver competitive products and
services. These changes make traditional work management
and organization less effective in the new environment.
2. The nature of business has changed, and the competitive environment
is more demanding as a result of changes caused by:
— Increased dependence on intellectual capital (IC) assets —
that is, assets of personal competitive knowledge, expertise,
understanding, and assets of structural intellectual capital
—to create and deliver competitive customized products
and services. This contrasts with earlier business models
that were focused on financial and physical capital.
— Pressures from globalization. Quality and highly competent
suppliers from across the world are able to transcend geographical
boundaries to compete nearly everywhere.
— Competitive differentiations based on product uniqueness,
which are increasingly being based on product capabilities
supported by related service arrangements that often are
highly targeted and customized.
— Better informed customers who have an improved understanding
of their needs and therefore impose greater requirements
on suppliers. Today, customers also have a greater
choice of suppliers than previously.
— Competitors who are increasingly becoming more sophisticated
and smarter.
3. New and more complex management, operational, and technical
approaches and practices are introduced to deal with the
new challenges.
Many practices are based on practical experiences
with what works and what doesn’t. Others are based on
new theoretical insights from fields ranging from information
and management sciences to cognitive and social sciences.
Together, they give enterprises greater competitive capabilities
and an improved ability to perform and succeed. The new tools
constitute a challenge by themselves since they require new
understanding, initiatives, and efforts. The tools include:
— New generation knowledge management (NGKM)5 practices
that cover modern management theories and practices,
human capital management (HCM), intellectual capital
management (ICM), and the dynamic facilitation, manipulation,
and control to create, organize, deploy, and apply
knowledge to meet enterprise objectives. Emerging KM
practices are based partly on recent cognitive science
understandings of human capabilities, such as conceptual
blending and concepts for learning, conceptual skills
transfers, decision making, problem solving, and personal
motivations. The new practices are significantly based on
successful experiences when applying KM in advanced
enterprises.
— People-focused knowledge management that becomes more
explicit based on a better understanding of the nature of
intellectual, knowledge-intensive work, how situationhandling
and effective actions rely on knowledge such as
mental reference models, and people’s actions and behaviors
in general. It also becomes more explicit by the realization
that enterprises do not behave and respond as
machines—they are social systems.
— In the proactive enterprises, intellectual asset management
mentality that is becoming a cultural cornerstone caused
by the widespread concern for how better knowledge is
built and leveraged —through personal and company investments,
collaboration, and deeply entrenched and practiced
tradeoffs between short-term facilitation and long-term
strength.
— Integrative management that involves proactive perspectives
and integration of strategic, tactical, and operational views
and activities between business units, departments, and
individuals. Integrative management relies on extensive
and effective communication, the introduction of incentives,
and cultural changes to motivate required behaviors. It also
introduces asset-based management mentality, principles,
and measurement systems applied to intangible assets to
maximize their value over time.
— Advanced information management and technology
(IM&IT), which focuses on intangible as well as tangible
asset-based management principles for information and
includes a wide range of technologies such as:
— Artificial intelligence (AI) for automatic reasoning
— Collaborative and groupware environments
— Content management
— Corporate history repositories and other approaches
— Customer relations management (CRM)
— Data mining
— E-learning
— Electronic performance support systems (EPSSs)
— Enterprise resource management (ERM)
— Enterprise value creation (EVC)
— Extensive automation of routine business functions
— Interactive computer-based training (ICBT)
— Internet and intranet portals
— Knowledge management support systems (KMSSs),
including knowledge capture systems and knowledge
deployment systems
— Supply chain management (SCM)
The introduction of new management approaches and capabilities
facilitates efficient and effective work; that is, execution
of individual and group activities. Some approaches also
provide direct support —even offloading —of mental tasks
such as summarizing and organizing information and, to some
extent, reasoning.
The new management approaches are not automatically easy
to adopt. For many managers, professionals, and crafts people,
pursuing and implementing the new directions and practices
present problems. The approaches require depths of expertise
and involvement in professional disciplines that often go
beyond current business practices. The ability to handle the new
approaches requires learning and development of new perspectives
by managers and staff —efforts that may exceed the
energy and availability of the people involved. Hence, only
highly motivated and proactive parties appear to adopt the new
approaches.
4. The rate of change is higher than at any time before.
New
technologies, new business conditions, new regulatory and
legal requirements, new practices, and new demands are being
introduced more quickly than ever before. These changes
require proactive stances to detect future needs and very
different approaches to plan, create, and implement
solutions.
5. Workers demand greater involvement and are less satisfied with
traditional employment situations.
Only a small fraction of
enterprises treat their employees “right”. Typical
business–employee relationships are impersonal and provide
little understanding of, involvement in, and sense of contribution
to the enterprise’s strategy and direction. As stated by
Dawn Lepore: “Employees will work for money but will give
a piece of their lives for meaning!”
6. Needs for conventional training and education often exceed
allocated time.
The knowledge economy requires frequent
updating of both personal and structural knowledge to adapt
to new demands and conditions. However, many—perhaps
most—organizations expect their employees to maintain and
renew their personal knowledge on their own time. This often creates moral and family problems,
and can decrease the motivation and effectiveness of the workforce.
Computer-based training material —e-learning—is frequently
provided but appears to be less effective than is often
perceived, and many companies report bad experiences, with
low knowledge retention and other problems ranging from
cheating to negative attitudes.
Instead of wide separation of work from education and training,
many organizations now pursue “just-in-time training” as part of
regular work using sophisticated computer-based knowledge support
systems, shadowing, “buddy coaching,” and tailored e-learning
accessible to managers, professionals, and crafts people. However,
these approaches require new practices, application of new technologies,
and revision of work in general. They often provide better
knowledge transfer as we now start to understand it from new cognitive
psychology findings.
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