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

Developing knowledge-based strategies for a virtual organization
knowledge is amazing but also inevitably confusing. Here we
try to give a more user-friendly view.
Broadly, the term knowledge management is used to describe
the entire business of recognizing and managing all of an
organization’s intellectual assets to meet business objectives.
These intellectual assets may be information passing through
channels, skills and tricks picked up and shared between
employees, or the structured dissemination of regulations,
procedures and the like.
Knowledge management looks at how an organization adapts to
changing conditions to survive in the same way that animal and
plant species change over time to adapt to changing conditions
– or, like unsuccessful firms, they die off or are swallowed up by
more successful competitors. With advances in technology,
communications, transport and shared worldwide media, the
business environment is increasingly sensitive to things happening
far away. The speed at which events change the business
environment is also far faster than ever before. This means that
business success and survival is increasingly a chancy business
with more opportunities for failure at every step.
Essentially, the idea of knowledge management is that it actively
tries to find and create organizational processes that capture and
create useful combinations of:
� data;
� information processing;
� all information and communications technologies; and
� the creative and innovative capacity of human beings.
Knowledge does not just happen along as a result of processes
or activities; it comes from people and communities of people.
An organization needs to know what knowledge it has and
what knowledge it requires. Here it is important to recognize
that not all knowledge is ready to use and even to be recognized.
While much information can be gathered and collected for
analysis, it is a much harder task to capture the skills and
experience that lie in a person’s mind. Most of us learn by doing
things, and often know when something is a mistake – because
we have seen it before. It is not always easy to recognize where
this knowledge lies in an organization, and the loss of
knowledge when employees change jobs can be a significant
factor in a firm’s performance.
David Skyrme and Associates (http://www.syyrme-
.com.km.html) have developed a specific definition of knowledge
management as: ‘Knowledge Management is the explicit
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