Now, as you have come this far in reading the book, you may have realized that these major key technology drivers can help you transform your businesses rapidly and provide agility that was not possible a few years back. But the most important aspect of all these technology innovations is predictability of your business that drives key decisions and business wisdom to run and manage operations effectively. In the information age, when knowledge is power, it is extremely significant for businesses to cultivate the knowledge ecosystem for survival, sustenance, continued growth, and business agility. We have assessed and evaluated the role of collaborative power (Chapter 5) and the role of collective intelligence (Chapter 8). In this chapter, we endeavor to highlight key elements of building knowledge ecosystems and the knowledge management (KM) process that will help a business to harness power for continued growth and leadership.
In the fiercely competitive business environment, all companies are competing in a complex and challenging context that is being transformed by many factors such as globalization, hypercompetition, technological development, and virtualization. These new technological innovations have forced organizations to think and behave differently in order to survive and prosper. Today, we acknowledge that the foundation of organizational competitiveness has shifted from an emphasis on physical and tangible resources to knowledge-based resources. It is imperative for companies to exploit, apply, and integrate their knowledge management capabilities into the enterprise.
The knowledge ecosystem includes all the intellectual abilities and knowledge possessed by employees, partners, and customers as well as their capacity to learn and acquire more knowledge. Knowledge management capability can be defined as the firm's ability to mobilize and deploy its knowledge-based resources in combination with other resources and capabilities.
Knowledge management is a planned, structured approach to develop knowledge management capabilities and to manage the identification, creation, sharing, and leveraging of knowledge-based resources as organizational assets in order to enhance a company's competitiveness. Knowledge management is the discipline of enabling individuals, teams, and entire organizations to collectively and systematically capture, store, create, share, and apply knowledge, to better achieve their objectives. Knowledge management incorporates ideas and processes from a wide variety of disciplines such as information management, information technology management, communication, human resources management, and others. In order to assess the larger picture of knowledge management in the organization, we analyze and evaluate knowledge management as a system in this chapter.
Knowledge management is a topic of interest today in both the industry world and the information research world. In our daily lives, we deal with a huge amount of data and information. Data and information are not knowledge until we know how to extract the value out of them. This is the reason we need knowledge management, which refers to a multidisciplined approach to achieving organizational objectives by making the best use of knowledge. KM focuses on processes such as acquiring, creating, and sharing knowledge, and the cultural and technical foundations that support those processes.
Knowledge management may be described in terms of:
Or it may be looked at differently with these factors:
In this chapter, we emphasize mostly the technological aspects of knowledge management. This approach involves the collection, codification, storage, and manipulation of knowledge using technical systems. The three main features of the system strategy of knowledge management are:
Knowledge management also requires specific attention to the human, organizational, and cultural aspects. It is important to understand that knowledge initiates, propagates, and permeates with people within organization. That is why, in contrast to technological knowledge management, socially based knowledge management emphasizes knowledge that can be acquired and shared via a socially interactive process. As we noted in Chapter 7, the evolution of social media has created a revolution in social interaction, and that renews the focus of knowledge management with new perspectives.
Knowledge management draws from a wide range of disciplines and technologies:
The sociotechnical paradigm combines the social and technical aspects, and could be described as the study of the relationships between the social and technical parts of any system. The sociotechnical view of knowledge management focuses on a firm's strategy for harmonizing knowledge management activities with technological drivers and social enablers to achieve its business objectives.
The new knowledge management systems must include databases, intranet, groupware, search engines, social media, big data, and predictive analytics. They may be divided into several major categories such as groupware, including e-mail and wikis; decision support systems; expert systems; document management systems; semantic networks; relational and object-oriented databases; simulation tools; big data; and artificial and predictive intelligence.
In general, a sociotechnical knowledge management system could be defined as a set of technological and social elements that ensures the development of a knowledge management process and the creation of appropriate organizational conditions.
According to the previous analysis, we could stress that a knowledge management system includes three main subsystems:
The most obvious components of the sociotechnical knowledge management system are people and their knowledge. Knowledge includes explicit knowledge that is expressed in words and numbers and codified in manuals, databases, and information systems, as well as tacit knowledge that is shared collectively in the firm in the form of routines, culture, and know-how. Individual knowledge is transformed into the organizational knowledge through the process of knowledge management. (See Figure 9.1.) The process of knowledge management includes a set of practices or activities that are initiated in organization in order to identify, acquire, create, store, disseminate, and apply knowledge. These key processes are considered during designing the knowledge management system in the organization:
Knowledge management should be integrated into other organizational processes that create value. The process of knowledge management should also be harmonized with general corporate strategy and maintained by an appropriate culture. This requires the formation of a suitable organizational context (i.e., particular sociotechnical environment), which is created in order to ensure the working of the process of knowledge management. In accordance with the analysis of the main components of the sociotechnical knowledge management system, five major elements of the sociotechnical environment could be identified:
A collection of data is not information. This implies that a collection of data for which there is no relationship between the pieces of data is not information. Wisdom arises when one understands the foundational principles responsible for the patterns representing knowledge being what they are. And wisdom, even more so than knowledge, tends to create its own context. So, in summary the following associations can reasonably be made:
The following example with reference to a bank savings account illustrates how data, information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom relate to interest, principal, and interest rate.
Data: The numbers 100 or 5 percent, completely out of context, are just pieces of data. Interest, principal, and interest rate, out of context, are not much more than data, as each has multiple meanings that are context dependent.
Information: If we establish a bank savings account as the basis for context, then interest, principal, and interest rate become meaningful in that context with specific interpretations.
Knowledge: If I put $100 in my savings account, and the bank pays 5 percent interest yearly, then at the end of one year the bank will compute the interest of $5 and add it to my principal and I will have $105 in the bank. This pattern represents knowledge that allows understanding of how the pattern will evolve over time and the results it will produce.
Understanding: Understanding is a cognitive and analytical process that takes knowledge and synthesizes new knowledge from the previously held knowledge. The difference between understanding and knowledge is the difference between learning and memorizing. Understanding can build upon currently held information, knowledge, and understanding itself. In computer parlance, artificial intelligence (AI) systems possess understanding in the sense that they are able to synthesize new knowledge from previously stored information and knowledge.
Wisdom: Wisdom is an extrapolative and nondeterministic, nonprobabilistic process. It calls upon all the previous levels of consciousness, and specifically upon special types of human programming (morality, ethical codes, etc.). Wisdom is the process by which we also discern, or judge, between right and wrong, good and bad. Wisdom is a uniquely human state that requires one to have the capability to make an intellectual judgment.
Some benefits of knowledge management correlate directly to bottom-line savings, while others are more difficult to quantify. In today's information-driven economy, knowledge resources are proven as an important asset to provide business agility. To get the most value from a company's intellectual assets, it is highly important that knowledge be shared and served as the foundation for collaboration. An effective knowledge ecosystem should help businesses do one or more of the following:
Figure 9.2 reflects the main technologies that currently support knowledge management systems.
These technologies are well represented by four main stages of the KM life cycle:
All of these stages are enhanced by effective work flow and project management.
By harnessing the capabilities of knowledge-infused customer relationship management (CRM) and intelligent integration of CRM and KM, businesses become intelligent and informed to address customers' needs more effectively. With the addition of KM, organizations gain the centralized intelligence they need for delivering fast, accurate, relevant answers. Providing this centralized intelligence is the best way to foster the knowledge and confidence that agents desire. Here are a few ways knowledge-infused CRM can benefit today's support organizations:
After downsizing, customer service organizations often lose some of their more experienced support agents. Therefore it is vital to move from a support model in which knowledge and expertise walk out the door when seasoned employees leave to a more collaborative support model in which solutions are developed, managed, and shared as part of the daily resolution process. This not only helps with overall morale and confidence but also empowers new agents to become more proficient faster. Knowledge-infused CRM systems can provide answers in real time with minimal agent involvement. For example, as a service agent is working on the case resolution screen, an integrated KM solution can automatically leverage the context of the interaction and provide immediate advice to assist with the resolution process.
In the wake of reorganization, a reduction in staff, and turnover, new as well as existing employees need to be trained. Knowledge solutions coupled with CRM can have a dramatic impact on reducing employee training schedules. Instead of investing in training programs that take agents away from servicing customers, management can focus on developing the essential content required for basic problem resolution and knowledge retrieval. Ultimately, organizations can shorten training schedules. Plus, with the KM system accessible through the CRM interface on each agent's desktop, agents can work to get the answers they need in a single application.
To reduce costs, many organizations have been forced to consolidate call centers or business units, which can mean longer call times, increased escalations, and decreased first-call resolution rates. By arming agents with one-click access to better information, knowledge-infused CRM can help organizations avoid these negative trends. With access to knowledge through their existing CRM interface, problem resolution becomes faster and more seamless for agents.
When KM and CRM are fully integrated with all support channels, the playing field for agent competencies is leveled and every agent can more quickly and intuitively deliver consistent answers.
Knowledge-infused CRM can be fully leveraged in agent-assisted channels as well as in web self-service. Powering knowledge-infused CRM with a centralized knowledge platform means that customers get the same correct answers, regardless of the channel they use.
Knowledge culminates in wisdom, and collective knowledge captured and delivered within an enterprise helps in managing the business effectively for sustainable competitive advantage.
Cultivating a knowledge ecosystem is all about culture. A great example is the San Francisco Giants story of how the team parlayed an integrated big data analytics strategy into a World Series Championship in 2010 and again in 2012. The secret to the Giants chemistry is trust, and the master chemist is CIO Bill Schlough, who keeps his team ahead of the game with a world championship culture. After reading the December 17, 2012, article in Information Week titled “Chief of the Year” by Fritz Nelson describing his CIO of the Year award, it is clear that if you want to see the convergence of the Force 5 Tornado technologies in action, then you could go see a San Francisco Giants ballgame at AT&T Park.
The story that Bill Schlough tells is about the holistic business value of ubiquitous IT that has transformed the Giants organization in terms of customer experience in the park and online, as well as enabled world championship player performance on the field and reengineered the business of baseball in the front office. Such results are no coincidence; rather they reflect the San Francisco Giants official mission statement as their dedication “to enriching our community through innovation and excellence on and off the field.” They embrace the spirit and letter of the strategies and tactics that we have described in Creating Business Agility. The following examples are only some of the innovations:
Enterprise systems integration examples include: “replacing the homegrown CRM system the team has used for years, containing information on 700,000 customers, with Salesforce.com, and a new ticketing platform, these two systems (ticketing and CRM) will come together at a few points. The team is testing mobile point-of-sale systems in stores.…The goal is to integrate all customer data, from ticket purchasers to callers, into the Giants' ShoreTel VoIP system, and to ‘track the value of every customer and accurately assess the likelihood of losing that customer, or how to retain that customer,’ Schlough says. The organization wants to cater to each customer based on past behavior and interaction.”
As an example of his customer engagement thinking, Schlough wants to install mobile device charging stations around the ballpark in order to deliver apps with a “whole product” digital experience to Giants fans throughout the complete MLB ecosystem.
Another use case describing the role that knowledge ecosystems play in creating business agility is demonstrated by Oracle in winning the greatest comeback in sports history.
The story, titled “Faster” by Carol Hildebrand, of how ORACLE TEAM USA has used IT as a strategic tool for defending the 34th America's Cup in San Francisco Bay was published in the September/October 2013 edition of Oracle Magazine. It provides a fascinating look at the ORACLE TEAM USA culture that leveraged a multipronged technology strategy for big data:
The AC72s are twenty-first-century sailboats. They are data-driven boats that can fly across the water at a speed faster than the wind that powers them. There are over 300 sensors throughout the boat that collect real-time performance data that is transmitted to a server in the hull. “Sensors measure the strain on the mast, hull, and wing; monitor the load generated on components ranging from the jib to the winches; and monitor the effectiveness of each change made by the trimmers, who constantly adjust the sail wing to fully exploit wind conditions.” The raw data consists of over 3,000 variables generated 10 times a second during sailing runs. ORACLE TEAM USA also produces several video feeds and still images of the sails every second.
A typical training run creates about a gigabyte of raw performance data as well as 150 to 200 gigabytes of video, adding it to about 80 gigabytes of weather and boat data, plus performance metadata from the current 2013 America's Cup campaign as well as a cache of historical race data. ORACLE TEAM USA uses this raw performance data, coupled with the videos and still images, tailored for diverse analytics scenarios.
The AC72s always sail with a chase boat that serves as the real-time analytical hub. The performance team manages a set of 150 variables that are transmitted in real time to the Oracle Database operating on the performance chase boat. The team performs a variety of analyses to optimize boat performance, and sends that information to the ORACLE TEAM USA sailors by a wireless network. Real-time analytics usage extends to the ORACLE TEAM USA sailors who wear “ruggedized” PDAs on their arms and receive customized information in real-time drive sailing performance. There are also several tablet devices in located on the boat that display general nautical data such as wind speed.
When the boats dock, their servers and the database on the performance boat, are synced with the Oracle Database instance on the team's Exadata Database Machine X3-2. The Oracle Database is the core of the operation. It is used as a centralized race management hub that can support a wide variety of access mechanisms and devices, from traditional queries and custom-built tools to Oracle Application Express–based web pages and mobile apps.
“The most widely used tool is Race Cutter, a custom application that pulls sensor data from the Exadata Database Machine X3-2, with added metadata markers that synchronize the video, photos, and audio streams with the raw numbers. Team members can click to a certain moment and view all the pertinent information from that time stamp.”
“The performance team builds reports to help designers and sailors solve the challenges of one-boat testing. Instead of comparing data from two boats under sail, the performance analysis has to be done numerically by comparing data sets. One estimate is that with one-boat testing, you need to collect 40 times as much data to get good results.”
Oracle Application Express is used for making information easier to collect and distribute. An example is an application that simplifies performance test data quality control. It also automates the second level of quality control, creating web pages that crew members use to check and correct a lot of what he calls the metadata. Sailors also have access to an Oracle Application Express–based mobile app that automates the 250-item checklist necessary to prep the boat for sailing.
Sailing the AC72s has produced a data-driven racing culture that may serve the America's Cup ecosystem with a new basis of competitive advantage. ORACLE TEAM USA has already demonstrated the ability to improve the pure boat speed around the course over multiple days and sailing conditions by 20 to 30 percent. Clearly the synergy of big data analytics technology and culture may create the business agility needed for sustaining the competitive advantage to defend the future championship.
Although in this dynamic and rapidly changing time it is difficult to foresee the future for more than a few years, we will try to see and highlight the business and technology landscape beyond 2020 in the next and final chapter. We have witnessed these innovations and the game-changing revolution in the past few years impacting our businesses and economy, leaving many wondering what comes next and what the environment will look like in the next few years. We can only say that due to the way technology is converging in all areas and influencing our lifestyles and work environments, it is not going to be the same. Technology has a lot to offer and has great potential to help us run our businesses with greater agility and (most of all) lead our lives in a way that was unthinkable and inconceivable just a few years back.
18.222.161.187