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

Developing knowledge-based strategies for a virtual organization
that can provide multiple, diverse and contradictory interpretations.
This has been described as ‘the sense-making view’
and is one that promotes continual challenge to the current way
of doing things within a company and also forms a basis for a
continual challenge against procedures that would otherwise
become a different set – congealing and outliving their usefulness,
perhaps.
Skyrme and Amidon (1997) specifically identify three new
aspects for the knowledge agenda:
1 Making knowledge and knowledge processes more explicit.
2 The development of strategic frameworks to guide the
exploitation of knowledge – in products, services and
processes.
3 The introduction of more systematic methods to the management
of knowledge.
These are the issues we will be addressing in the remainder of
this chapter.
7.4 Knowledge as an asset
We would all agree that knowledge is an asset – whether it is
knowing how long you can leave your car outside a building
before getting a ticket, or knowing enough to get an Open
University degree that will give you a better job. But knowledge
is an asset in a different way from the way in which having cash
in the bank, good health, or a rich father is an asset. We may
usefully consider it as having four distinguishing
characteristics:
1 Extraordinary leverage and increasing returns – unlike most
assets, knowledge is not subject to diminishing returns but
grows in value.
2 Fragmentation, leakage and the need for refreshment – as a
collected body of knowledge grows it tends to branch and
fragment. The pieces may lose touch with each other. This
means that sometimes a lot of effort is put into creating an
area of knowledge that is already known but by people in
other places whom we didn’t think to ask. For this reason we
need to keep refreshing our communication channels and
knowledge reserves.
3 Uncertain value – the results of knowledge gathering or
sharing can be extremely difficult to estimate or measure and
may not come up to expectations or equally may exceed
them.
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