If you survey the recent business and technology literature, you will invariably see an author write “we live in a knowledge society.” On the surface, this seems self-evident. But understanding the full implications behind this idea can be quite challenging. What does it mean when an organization’s value is mainly a function of its knowledge, or that an organization can only be truly effective if it manages its knowledge effectively?
In this Section, we focus on the value of knowledge. We illustrate how knowledge management can create sustainable competitive advantage and provide several tools to help demonstrate that knowledge management can provide quantifiable business results.
- Sources of Value. Value from knowledge management is created in many ways. In some cases, companies are very focused on achieving a single, specific objective, like cycle time improvement or cost reduction. Other companies have more intangible goals, like making higher-quality decisions or moving their companies toward a more knowledge sharing culture. This section presents several examples of how organizations achieve business value from KM projects. Benefits are grouped into tangible and intangible categories.
- Valuation of Intangible Assets. Intangible assets can make up a huge fraction of a company’s market valuation. Unfortunately, we have no accounting system that captures all the hidden component values—brand, human capital, partnerships, intellectual property—embedded within the total market valuation of a company. In fact, our current system of financial measurement has become increasingly disconnected from what appears to be truly valuable. Iknow is helping to pioneer a new approach for identifying and valuing the key intangible assets that create value in today's organization.
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Other Related Links
- Inventory of Intellectual Assets. An important dimension of knowledge management is the creation, use, storage, reuse, and repurposing of an organization's important intellectual assets. Often, we find that even the most knowledge-intensive industries and companies don't have a clear understanding of the various types of intellectual assets they have within their organizations, the number or extent of their assets, and the business value of the assets. The first step in any knowledge management project is to identify and inventory the company's intellectual assets.
- KM Business Case. Iknow specializes in creating and architecting knowledge management solutions that transform a company’s intellectual assets into sustainable “knowledge-based” competitive advantage. Click on this link to learn more about how Iknow creates a business case and the sources of value used for justifying the investment in knowledge management.
