Figure 2: ECM is the foundation of solid knowledge management
Source: Establishing a True Source of Product Content for Competitive Advantage,
AMR Research (Murphy (2003))
Retaining the knowledge to overcome "knowledge walkouts"
From the basis of an ECM architecture or framework, organizations can begin to successively learn and accumulate knowledge from its employees. The true intelligent enterprise is one with the capacity to learn from the collective experience of successive generations of workers and use its history to its advantage according to Gartner (2005). The most successful organizations are those that most effectively use the skills, expertise, and knowledge of their workers, whether incoming, outgoing, or somewhere in between.
With the urgency of an aging workforce facing companies around the world (the impending retirement of valuable knowledge workers), it's easy to lose a sense of balance. Stemming the brain drain, for many companies, means putting every ounce of effort into capturing what's in an employee's head before she walks out the door. HR organizations exert extraordinary effort here, urging departing employees to use their dwindling time to document their knowledge and cram it into a repository (Kimmerle, Wodzicki, Cress, 2008).
Knowledge Management for Many Organizations: Use it or Lose it
The fact that there are organizations whose knowledge management systems are best practices for their given industry, and have processes in place for capturing and retaining excellent components of their knowledge are still the fact that it must be used to be effective according to Gartner (2006). Based on "the last mile" of knowledge management so to speak being these processes of selectively applying the content to specific business strategies and challenges, the indexing, search, and retrieval of knowledge in these repositories becomes a completely separate issue.
Once in the repository, there's little guarantee that the valuable knowledge ever emerges again. In fact, it's not valuable at all without a thorough consideration for the way new workers will access it and put it to use. Getting workers to change how they do their jobs is also a critical aspect of capturing content, according to the Hard Side of Change Management (2005).
Certainly, search engines, portal frameworks, content management, collaboration platforms, expertise location, and e-learning systems have geared themselves to addressing these problems according to Columbus and Murphy (2002).. Business process management (BPM) is also playing an increasingly vital technology role, as embedding knowledge into codified processes is an effective way to ensure companies learn from experience.
Knowledge for the new workforce
What is very apparent from the research and findings for this paper is the fact that companies have got to think ahead. Better knowledge management strategies must account for and capitalize upon the skills and expertise of the incoming workforce, along with the tools they're already accustomed to and adept at using (Evans, 2007).
Many of the new workers entering a company interact with information in far different ways from the exiting old workers. The new workforce grew up on the web, using instant messaging as opposed to e-mail, thumbing shorthand text messages on cell phone keypads, and creating and offering their mySpace profiles and blogs to the world.
To the graying workers, this new wave of workers looks more like a generation of distraction. No matter what amount of effort one goes through to make new workers equal to the old, they will never be the same. But different doesn't have to mean worse. In fact, in light of the dearth of available replacements in many industries, many companies are discovering it doesn't have to mean "worse."
Employees in the emerging workforce will have to be more productive on their own, and they'll have to collaborate and coordinate work more effectively with others inside and outside of the organization (Perrott, 2008). They'll also have to be better at conveying knowledge to your next generation of workers.
New technology for the new generation
If there is a single lesson learned by organizations instituting their own knowledge management strategies to alleviate the significant risk of losing intellectual property from "knowledge walkouts" it's the fact that the next wave of collaborative tools has already arrived according to McKinsey & Company (2005). The next generation of workers that will pick up the positions...
..A third is to treat every intervention into knowledge work as an experiment-with measures, a control group, clear hypotheses about the result and so forth. Nothing happens or changes unless a manager makes it happen. The cultural factors affecting organizational change have almost certainly been undervalued, and cultural/behavioristic implementations have shown some benefits. But the cause-effect relationship between cultural strategy and business benefits is not clear, because we still can't make
Knowledge Management Toolkit A data warehouse encompasses and provides access to all the company's information to whoever needs access to it. A warehouse literally means a storehouse, and the information within an organization may be distributed within one computer or with many computers, form one single warehouse. They may contain several databases and all types of information, and in a large variety of different formats. However, all the above information and
Knowledge Ecommerce Discuss three e-commerce applications. Give one merit and one drawback for each. Amazon -- has a multitude of different products, good prices, and user reviews. Amazon has been known to use many questionable business practices. EBay -- People can buy and sell used items on EBay and some people use it for their own small businesses. There is no centralized quality control since many items are used so you can easily get
The World Bank model centers on a five-person team called the Performance Advisory Service or PAS (Yandrick 1995). PAS trains supervisors to analyze work performance and personality problems. The supervisor first determines if a skill deficiency is involved or there are personal and environmental factors. He does this by reviewing the employee's records in search of troubled behavioral patterns; consulting with work team leaders, colleagues and support staff in investigating
The vision Oracle has is one of unifying all of their enterprise applications into their Fusion architecture and creating a single unifying Service oriented Architecture (SOA) was first announced in 2006 (Krill, 13). Since that time Oracle has continually strived to create an SOA in Fusion that would appeal to its corporate customers. The proposed Fusion SOA platform has been designed to be robust and scalable enough to encompass enterprise-level
Management Technologies in American Corporations An exploration of knowledge organizations and their management of information using both the Internet and digital means This paper will explore the pros and cons of both, and make recommendations for implementing them into companies, both large and small, and finally show real-world examples of these technologies in use in some of the most prominent American companies today. Today, we live in a very complex world. Technology
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