When was it not true that a firm’s knowledge was the key to its competitive advantage? At first blush, that seems obvious. But just as clearly, firms up to now have not actively managed this critical asset. The new interest in knowledge management springs from the convergence of six major trends. Together, they are making it more necessary—but thankfully, also more possible—to manage what an organization knows.
The first of these trends is an accelerating rate of change in the business world. When change occurs, whether external or internal to an organization, people need new knowledge to do their work. What they knew before becomes obsolete. Of course, new learning happens naturally—up to a point. When change comes rapidly, the organization can’t rely on its old, informal ways of gaining and transferring knowledge. They simply will not keep pace with the leading edge.
Why knowledge? Why now?
by Rudy Ruggles
(1997)
http://www.providersedge.com/docs/km_articles/Why_Knowledge_Why_Now.pdf
The fact is that, while it’s true that an organization’s knowledge has always been critical to its competitive success, up to now it wasn’t so much in need of explicit management. Yes, it was vital—so was oxygen. But you no more had to manage it than you had to manage how employees breathed; knowledge flowed naturally, informally, at a level sufficient to fuel a marketplace advantage. (At least, that was the assumption.) As a result, it wasn’t even a topic of discussion. Try finding many references to knowledge—or key synonyms such as insight, understanding, or judgment—in any well-regarded business text or journal in the past 25 years (always making an exception for Peter Drucker).
Things have changed. Today, the firm that leaves knowledge to its own devices puts itself in severe jeopardy. At best, this extremely valuable asset remains underleveraged, isolated in pockets of the organization, trapped in individual minds and local venues. At worst, the knowledge of executives running the firm has become obsolete, and is pushing it into a downward spiral. To avoid that fate, innovative managers in a vanguard of firms are taking positive action. Recognizing the value of knowledge, they are explicitly working to build better environments for knowledge to be created and better methods of measuring and managing its outputs.
(sk)
息をするのが自然の状態であれば、誰も意識して息をしないし、息をすることを管理しようとは思わない。体内の酸素量が低下し、呼吸を管理しなければならない状態は別として、本来、息をすることを管理する必要はない。
知識も同じで、本来、管理する必要のない知識を管理しなければならないというのは、あまりいい状態ではないのではないか。