[8] 2002 e-business-strategies-for-virtual-organizations

e-Business Strategies for Virtual Organizations
perpetual strategy process that will embed knowledge and
competitive intelligence into a continual monitoring of the
external and internal environment and allow managed change
and continual reengineering of the organization in line with
shifting demands.
This strategy needs to be resource-based: emphasizing distinctive,
firm-specific and hard-to-copy assets, skills and knowledge.
These are generally referred to as core competencies or
distinctive capabilities that confer competitive advantage on the
business.
Strategic management or management of strategic innovation is
the planned use of such organizational skills and knowledge.
These strategies, however, are not so easily implemented in an
online or virtual community where concepts such as assets,
skills and knowledge may not be the sole property of a single
company: they may derive from the overall combination of
multiple organizations networked in the virtual chain. It is
nevertheless vital – as organizations become more virtual – that
experience, information and expertise are coherently managed
and used to support future e-business initiatives and enhanced
virtual alliances. With the increasing amount and value of
information needed by every firm, the task of transforming this
into a body of knowledge available as and when needed is
becoming a paramount necessity for survival.
In this chapter we shall be looking at the knowledge difference
in terms of the concepts of knowledge management and the
benefits that an organization gets from it. We then consider
suggested approaches to knowledge-based strategy development.
Using a virtual organizing framework, the strategies for
implementing knowledge-based management are reviewed and
considered in relation to the likely problems that will arise.
Finally, we look at whether and how we can find new ways to
measure successful performance in a world of commerce that is
playing by new rules.
7.3 Knowledge management – what it is and
what it isn’t
144
Knowledge management is a fashionable term today in business
circles. Look at the website http://brint.com and see a sample of
the hundreds of papers generated in the past few years. Then try
a search for the term ‘knowledge management’ in a couple of
search engines – the amount of information generated about