Achieving sustainable competitive advantage by knowing what you know

Achieving sustainable competitive advantage by knowing what you know

by Art Murray

The new century has brought a new set of challenges: knowledge going out the door (“brain drain”); poor or inconsistent decision-making; declining knowledge worker productivity; and ever-increasing pressure to "do more with less." Organizations who successfully answer these challenges will dramatically outperform those who don’t.

High-performance organizations attack these problems head-on by:

Capturing their institutional knowledge
Streamlining and improving decision-making.

Work has become extremely knowledge-intensive. Knowledge workers are facing growing complexity, mind-numbing regulations, and the blinding speed of change. It takes time for your people to learn their jobs, and keep up with all the changes. When they leave, that knowledge is gone forever, and someone else has to come in and start all over.

Then there’s the problem of decision-making. One wrong decision, no matter how small, can set you back financially. Or result in a lawsuit. Or land you in jail. The demands on your time are great. You need to make decisions quickly. But how do you make sure you have all the information you need? And if you do, will you get through it in time? Are you drowning in information and starved for knowledge?

You are faced with competitive pressures. Budget cuts. Price reductions. You have growth targets to meet. You may be wondering just how you're going to survive.

Fortunately, there is a solution. Some leading organizations are performing better in the face of all these pressures. And you can too, by knowing what you know. By capturing your knowledge, and making it the centerpiece of your enterprise, you will not only keep it, but grow it. You will be able to make better decisions, faster. Which means you will be able to deliver superior results to your clients, stakeholders, and constituents.

Here is our two-step approach to helping you become a high-performance knowledge organization:

Capture your most critical knowledge, by modeling how top performers make decisions
Streamline and improve your decision processes by:

Retrieving only relevant, actionable information
Using the captured knowledge to guide your people into taking the right action, based on the best available information
Reducing the burdens of paperwork - paperwork that can eat up 30% or more of your total labor costs.

The ability to make timely, accurate, and consistent decisions is critical to success in today’s fast-changing market. How much effort are you putting in to managing this critical knowledge asset?