Today, a new managerial approach may be necessary as the new global business environment demands are increasingly difficult to sustain competitiveness. This article suggests new insights to identify strategic knowledge management as a primary driver of organizational competitiveness. Executives will see that creating a sustainable competitive advantage requires strategically managing information and knowledge within companies.
Executives are spending more time today concerned about operational risk than ever before. Operational risk is an operational approach to represent strategic knowledge management, but in this case, it seeks to apply organizational knowledge in order to satisfy and exceed customer’s expectations. Similar to customer relationship management, strategic knowledge management is an enabler for identifying and satisfying customer’s needs and manifests itself as a significant driver that motivates the development of relationships with customers. Executives can use strategic knowledge management to improve customer satisfaction through acquiring additional knowledge from customers, developing better relationships with them, and providing a higher quality of service and/or products for them.
Executives know that discontinuity exists at all levels of a product and services and they do not want to find themselves caught off guard, becoming obsolete. To remain competitive, executives must realize that they have to quickly create and share new ideas and knowledge to be more responsive to market changes. Knowledge held by organizational members is the most strategic resource for competitive advantage and through the way it is managed by executives.
Once the important paradigm of strategic knowledge management was accepted by both the scholars of the academy of management and executives, the knowledge cycle model began to make sense. Executives can look at the three-step processes of knowledge accumulation, integration, and reconfiguration. Executives can enhance knowledge accumulation which is associated with coaching and mentoring activities by sharing experiences gained by imitating, observing, and practicing. Executives can, in fact, help followers add meaningfulness to their work in ways enhancing a shared understanding among members to enhance engagement.
Organizational knowledge is also articulated into formal language that represents official statements. Organizational knowledge is incorporated into formal language and subsequently becomes available to be shared within organizations. Executives have their internet technology departments to create a combination that reshapes existing organizational knowledge to more systematic and complex forms by. For example, using internal databases. Organizing knowledge using databases and archives can make knowledge available throughout the organization- organized knowledge can be disseminated and searched by others. Most importantly, in knowledge integration, organizational knowledge is internalized through learning by doing which is more engaging.
It is important to note that executives have found that shared mental models and technical know-how become valuable assets. Organizational knowledge, which is reflected in moral and ethical standards and the degree of awareness about organizational visions and missions, can in turn be used in strategic decision making. Organizational knowledge can be converted to create new knowledge that executives can view and implement immediately in managerial decision making. Applying knowledge aimed at providing better decision-making and work-related practices and creating new knowledge through innovation.
Finally, when executives agree to share knowledge with other organizations in the environment, studies have shown that that knowledge is often difficult to share externally. One reason is that other organizations have too much pride to accept knowledge or are apprehensive to expose themselves to the competition. Therefore, executives may lack the required capabilities to interact with other organizations.
Learning in organizations is the ultimate outcome of knowledge reconfiguration by which organizational knowledge is created and acquired by connecting knowledge with other companies that want to share successes and failures. This leads to converting acquired knowledge into organizational processes and activities to improve processes that contribute to success. Executives can now see that a company’s capability to manage the organizational knowledge cycle is the most crucial factor in a sustainable competitive advantage. This core-competitive advantage relies on and among people.
This article raises a vital question as to how executives can successfully improve organizational competitiveness and might be the answer executives need. This model for managing knowledge takes a strategic, process-oriented approach and is relevant to operational risk. This model focuses on knowledge flows that executives use through embracing the processes of strategic knowledge management for strategic management decision-making. This model takes a task-based approach by translating the management of knowledge into various organizational processes.
The knowledge cycle model develops a firm-specific approach by which organizational knowledge provides a significant contribution to business objectives through the context-dependent way it is managed. This model can also help companies identify their inefficiencies in each process, and subsequently recover them on an instantaneous basis which enables executives to prevent further operational risk.
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Mostafa Sayyadi works with senior business leaders to effectively develop innovation in companies and helps companies—from start-ups to the Fortune 100—succeed by improving the effectiveness of their leaders. He is a business book author and a long-time contributor to business publications and his work has been featured in top-flight business publications.