CAPÍTULO III Réxime xurídico dos montes públicos
Artigo 25. Desafectación dos montes de dominio público
coordinates plans, people and information resources to integrate the knowledge strategy into organizations, systems, product lines and business processes.
1.14 KNOWLEDGE AS A STRATEGIC ASSET
Business organizations are coming to view knowledge as their most valuable and strategic asset, and bringing that knowledge to bear on problems and opportunities as their most important capability. They are realizing that to remain competitive they must explicitly manage their intellectual assets and capabilities. Today, knowledge is considered as the most strategically important asset for every business organizations. Having unique access to valuable assets in an organisation is one way to create competitive advantage, in some cases either this may not be possible, or competitors may imitate or develop substitutes for those assets. Companies having superior knowledge, however, are able to coordinate and
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combine their traditional assets and capabilities in new and distinctive ways, providing more value for their customers than can their competitors. That is, by having superior intellectual assets, an organization can understand how to exploit and develop their traditional assets better than competitors, even if some or all of those traditional assets are not unique.Therefore, knowledge can be considered as the most important strategic asset, and the ability to acquire, integrate, store, share and apply it has become the most important capability for building and sustaining competitive advantage by any organisation. The broadest value proposition, then, for engaging in knowledge management is that it can enhance the organization’s fundamental ability to compete.
What is it about knowledge that makes the advantage sustainable? Knowledge, especially context-specific, tacit knowledge embedded in complex organizational routines and developed from experience, tends to be unique and difficult to imitate. And unlike many traditional assets, it is not easily purchased in the marketplace in a ready-to-use form. To acquire similar knowledge, competitors have to engage in similar experiences.
However, acquiring knowledge through experience takes time, and competitors are limited in how much they can accelerate their learning merely through greater investment.
Knowledge-based competitive advantage is also sustainable because the more a firm already knows, the more it can learn. Learning opportunities for an organization that already has a knowledge advantage may be more valuable than for competitors having similar learning opportunities but starting off knowing less.
Sustainability may also come from an organization already knowing something that uniquely complements newly acquired knowledge, providing an opportunity for knowledge synergy not available to its competitors. New knowledge is integrated with existing knowledge to develop unique insights and create even more valuable knowledge.
Organizations should therefore seek areas of learning and experimentation that can potentially add value to their existing knowledge via synergistic combination.
Sustainability of a knowledge advantage, then, comes from knowing more about some things than competitors, combined with the time constraints faced by competitors in acquiring similar knowledge, regardless of how much they invest to catch up. This represents what economists call increasing returns. Unlike traditional physical goods that are consumed as they are used, providing decreasing returns over time, knowledge provides increasing returns as it is used. The more it is used, the more valuable it becomes, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. If an organization can identify areas where its knowledge leads the competition, and if that unique knowledge can be applied profitably in the marketplace, it can represent a powerful and sustainable competitive advantage.
Organizations should strive to use their learning experiences to build on or complement knowledge positions that provide a current or future competitive advantage. Systematically mapping, categorizing and benchmarking organizational knowledge not only can help make
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knowledge more accessible throughout an organization, but by using a knowledge map to prioritize and focus its learning experiences, an organization can create greater leverage for its learning efforts. It can combine its learning experiences into a “critical learning mass”
around particular strategic areas of knowledge.
While a knowledge advantage may be sustainable, building a defensible competitive knowledge position internally is a long-term effort requiring foresight and planning as well as luck.
Longer lead time explains the attraction of strategic alliances and other forms of external ventures as potentially quicker means for gaining access to knowledge. It also explains why the strategic threat from technological discontinuity tends to come from firms outside of or peripheral to an industry. New entrants often enjoy a knowledge base different than that of incumbents, and which can be applied to the products and services of the industry under attack. This has been especially evident in industries where analog products are giving way to digital equivalents. The strategic challenge is to develop sufficient knowledge to support a shift to those new technologies and markets before non-traditional competitors make significant inroads in those markets, while not abandoning its years of experience and knowledge about physical imaging that is supporting its core business.
This long learning lead-time or “knowledge friction” highlights the importance of benchmarking and evaluating the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of an organization’s current knowledge platform and position, as this knowledge provides the primary opportunity from which to compete and grow over the near-to-intermediate term.
This must, in turn, be balanced against the organization’s long term plans for developing its knowledge platform.
Knowledge is not static and what is innovative knowledge today will ultimately become the core knowledge of tomorrow. Thus defending and growing a competitive position based on strategic knowledge asset requires continual learning and knowledge acquisition.
The ability of an organization to learn, accumulate knowledge from its experiences, and reapply that knowledge is itself a skill or competence that, beyond the core competencies directly related to delivering its product or service, may provide strategic advantage.
1.14.1 Asset Value of Knowledge
How valuable is knowledge? The value is in the eyes of the beholder - opinions vary widely. However, there are several directions you can approach this from:
Market value: what is specific knowledge assets worth on the open market e.g. a team of experts, a customer database, and a license for a patent?
Cost: how much does it cost to train a new hire? How many person-days went into developing your intranet content?
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Replacement cost: if you had a disaster (a team leaving, your computer records destroyed), what would it cost today to get back to where you started?Liability cost: how exposed are you to legal liability e.g. for product traceability, for long overlooked terms in extant contracts?
Many organizations do not have a handle on the value of their assets. They spend a fortune monitoring and accounting for physical assets; yet ignore those assets - that according to most surveys - are worth 5-10 time more than the assets recorded on the company’s balance sheet. Knowledge aware organizations consider human capital as an asset. It is one several components of intellectual capital - others are customer capital, structural capital and intellectual property.
Benefits Potential
For most organizations the real value of knowledge management is in the benefits it brings to the bottom line. These benefits range from increased knowledge worker productivity, to faster time-to-market for new products, to better customer service. Typically the benefits fall into the following categories:
Information and knowledge benefits - retrieving vital information faster, gaining access to expertise, having all the required information accessible in one pace (e.g. through a portal)
Intermediate benefits - minimizing duplication, sharing knowledge across organizational boundaries, getting new hire up to speed faster
Organizational benefits - reducing costs, increasing productivity, growing asset valuation, innovation
Customer and stakeholder benefits - better products and services, higher quality, better value.
SUMMARY
Knowledge management, as it is practiced today, is a system of technologies focused upon the delivery of strategically useful knowledge and expertise, the availability of which facilitates effective collaboration and timely decision-making. The major objectives of KM are creating knowledge repositories, improving knowledge access, enhancing the knowledge environment and managing knowledge as an asset. Effective knowledge management typically requires an appropriate combination of organisational, social, and managerial along with the deployment of appropriate technology. Technology is a facilitator of knowledge management, a tool to assist individuals and groups in creation, capturing and distribution of knowledge.
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Technology and knowledge are now the key factors of production. Various observers describe today’s global economy as one in transition to a ‘knowledge economy’, or an
‘information society’. The knowledge economy usually involve the production of knowledge-intensive goods (like software), and the large-scale capture, movement and utilisation of information using sophisticated network infrastructure (such as computers, cable, fiber and routers).
The various experts’ vision is that India will become a leader in the global knowledge economy by 2010. This will be the result of a highly focused effort to achieve global thought leadership in a few select fields that offer the highest potential for Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO).
Effective knowledge management typically requires an appropriate combination of organisational, social, and managerial along with the deployment of appropriate technology.
Technology is a facilitator of knowledge management, a tool to assist individuals and groups in creation, capturing and distribution of knowledge.
Knowledge management strategy is termed as an approach undertaken by an organization to use its information and knowledge resources for building competitive strength and sustainable growth for realizing that pursuing KM strategy can enable it to dramatically reduce cycle time and costs, increase sales, and to meet the customer needs.
Effective knowledge management is of vital importance for any enterprise with a quest to ensure viability and survival. Enterprises need to develop a KM strategy which impinges on all areas of the organization and requires a corporate approach to make it work.
Knowledge strategy designs an organisation’s future based on using knowledge effectively. Knowledge strategy starts with the notion that an organisation’s business strategy should guide its planning for knowledge management. Therefore, knowledge strategy follows business strategy. The first activity in knowledge strategy is understanding the current business strategy then progressing that strategy as the basis for organizational analysis.
Business organizations are coming to view knowledge as their most valuable and strategic asset, and bringing that knowledge to bear on problems and opportunities as their most important capability. They are realizing that to remain competitive they must explicitly manage their intellectual assets and capabilities.