We are living in a world filled with millions of knowledge professionals, researchers, adviser, consultants and assistants. The integration between human knowledge agents and technological agents is seamless, often making difficult to establish who contributes what. These dynamics get messy, complex and very interesting. Of course, my orientation is always inclined to the human, intellectual and emotional aspects of the knowledge society and the learning organizations. Knowledge, learning and innovative organizations, like QBS, are regularly capturing and applying their knowledge in design, manufacturing, sales and service delivery ventures. Knowledge is build in all kinds of products and services, and this process is accelerated due to the presence of interactive electronic books, personal digital assistants and integrated fax, telephone, and wireless computing and communication devices. We face a variety of publicly available commercial services and organizational processes that exploit ubiquitous and diverse knowledge systems.
Knowledge sharing is a critical element in developing the knowledge organization. A culture of learning encouragement to induce knowledge sharing is needed, as well as theoretical, conceptual and technological advances in developing the bridges between the islands of knowledge. Research plays an essential role in developing the knowledge organization. Domains or contexts suitable for knowledge discovery environment, working with different action models, requiring knowledge based decision making, and providing proper reinforcement for sound able actions are among the options, for undertaking this kind of task.
The knowledge organization uses an integrated approach to doing business. Through the employee knowledge profiles, this organization structures, in a loosely-couple manner, the best internal, multidisciplinary team to handle its business undertakings, its customer and stakeholders engagements. They tap into their knowledge repositories and business cases to learn how similar challenges and problems are handled and solved. They use knowledge management exchange tools to access, store, enhance and retrieve important information, knowledge, and heuristics (problems solving devices) relating to their business activity. Expert systems or units play a major role in providing an active advisory component to the organizationís knowledge foundation and institutional memory. This points toward intelligent-active libraries that are used and consulted on a daily basis. Integrated execution support systems complemented by knowledge repositories are breakthrough concepts needed to work with this integrated approach.
Let us finish by summarizing some design rules coming from the field of organizational sciences. 1) Knowledge based strategies or services begin with strategy. An organization has to know the kind of value it intends to provide and to whom, and then link its knowledge resources in ways that make a difference. 2) Knowledge-based strategies arenít strategies unless they are clearly link to execution results. If knowledge is not connected to measurable improvements in performance (including the bottom line), then the knowledge transformation is not making sense. Within the context of organizations, knowledge has to be useful. 3) Executing a knowledge-based strategy is about is about profoundly nurturing people with knowledge. Designers have to recognize that people will not share knowledge between themselves if their workplace culture does not aggressively support learning, cooperation, openness and exchanges. 4) Organizations leverage knowledge through network of people who collaborate, not through networks of technology that interconnect. 5) People network leverage knowledge through organization activation and invitation rather than centralized information obligation or mandate.
More than 40 years ago the great mind of Harold Wilensky (Organizational Intelligence) stated that organizational knowledge is a social outcome and is related to individual intelligences by mechanisms of aggregation, cross-level transference, and adequate distribution.
Copyright 2007 QBS, Inc.