
If knowledge management is an item on your team’s to-do list, you are already behind and will have to play catch-up. Next-generation knowledge management is allowing enterprises to reach a whole new level of collaboration and efficiency.
We have spoken to 100+ senior executives across industries worldwide regarding knowledge management. Our takeaways from these conversations are:
- Most executives face challenges with knowledge management and have a wishlist of things that were available or more easily accessible. Still, most executives think that their organization is taking sufficient steps to manage knowledge given business and technological constraints.
- Most executives think that their organization should invest in knowledge management for long-term success. On a personal level, most executives take part in activities related to knowledge management because they think such investment of time is the “right thing to do”.
- Most executives think of knowledge management as an important support function or cost center.
Based on these conversations, our work with various clients in solving their cognitive computing needs, and research of the knowledge practices of leading organizations, we came to two counter-intuitive conclusions:
- Knowledge, and ability to manage it, is the only sustainable competitive advantage for enterprises in the long term.
- Contributing to an organization’s knowledge base, and accessing the knowledge base for meaningful decisions should not cost anything to the professionals in terms of time and effort.
In fact, we believe that if knowledge management is an item on your team’s to-do list, you have already lost the game. The next generation enterprises are going to collaborate on a different dimension.
Our work has led to this self-assessment test which helps rank you and your team vs. what the enterprise world is doing today. You will be presented with six questions. Each question has a real case study that we have encountered, and that we think exemplifies next-generation behavior on some aspect of knowledge management. There are four options in each question which describe knowledge management practices for:
Common Practice: Describes how most organizations behave in terms of that particular aspect of knowledge management.
Advanced Practice: Describes the behavior of organizations that are advanced in their knowledge management practices.
Best Practice: Describes generally accepted best practices using traditional technologies, followed by leaders in knowledge management.
Next Generation Behavior: Describes groundbreaking practices followed by early adopters of next-generation mindset, and next-generation technologies like cognitive computing.
Let's see how your organization is doing.