Knowledge Management: Transforming Organisational Knowledge into Competitive Advantage

Overview

I not only use the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.
– Woodrow Wilson

In his book Managing in a Time of Great Change, Peter Drucker stressed how “knowledge has become the key economic resource and the dominant – and perhaps the only – source of competitive advantage”. Here in New Zealand, the ‘Knowledge Wave’ initiative has promoted a similar message: That companies get ahead by being smarter than their competitors. Indeed, everything you will ever read about the ‘knowledge economy’ repeats the same message – that, in today’s economy, wealth is created from knowledge.

So what is your organisation’s strategy for managing its knowledge?

This course provides a practical, hands-on introduction to developing such a strategy and unlocking the power of knowledge in your organisation.

Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival.
– W. Edwards Deming

Topics Covered

This Short Course covers topics such as:

• The relationship between knowledge, productivity and profitability
• Why working smarter involves more than just clever technology
• Where knowledge really resides in an organisation
• The value of social capital and intellectual capital (and how intellectual capital differs from intellectual property)
• How to build social capital
• Making the best use of the ‘informal organisation’
• The keys to managing knowledge successfully
• Practical tools for managing knowledge, including storytelling, knowledge mapping and Social Network Analysis
• Using technology to support knowledge sharing
• Traps for young players – and how to avoid them
• How to get started next Monday

Who should attend

This Short Course will benefit anyone who has ever wondered:

• Why ‘working smarter’ always seems to involve ‘working harder’
• If there was a more effective way to do their work, work with others and/or manage those who work for them
• Why real-world work processes bear little resemblance to the ones in the Procedures Manual
• If there was someone in the organisation who could help them do their job more effectively or better manage their clients
• If there was a way to better deal with the ever-increasing onslaught of information. (Hint: If your office is overflowing with files – or your in-box with messages – that’s you!)
• How to retain critical organisational knowledge even though the staff who know it may come and go

The consequences of managing knowledge poorly are not just stressed-out staff working harder (and less effectively) than they need to – it also undermines organisational performance and profitability. Common symptoms of poor management of knowledge include:

• Duplication of effort across different parts of the organisation (and, where things are really bad, between staff working in the same part of the organisation)
• An inability to learn from past mistakes (or to build on past successes)
• A reliance on idiosyncratic systems rather than on consistent processes and methodologies
• A lingering fear that staff turnover may mean losing key parts of the business to a competitor

If that sounds like the organisation you work for, then this is the course for you

Outcomes

You will learn how to create processes that will enable your organisation to identify, share and apply the best knowledge available to you on a continual basis.

At the end of this Short Course, you will be able to build a strategy for managing knowledge in your organisation. This strategy will help you and your organisation tap into the knowledge, experiences and creativity of staff, customers, suppliers and even competitors.