Working with Knowledge
Knowledge is at the heart of any business, whether it involves critical production processes, customer requirements, new technology or knowing what your competitors are doing.
Within an organisation, sharing of knowledge is vital to get different departments working together effectively, and to learn from success and failure. Strategic messages need to reach those in operations, and performance data must get back to management. Obstacles to knowledge working need to be overcome. Advantages can be gained through the learning of others, by the careful use of case studies.
It's critical to have people with the right knowledge now, and in the future. There's always a risk of losing people with valuable knowledge, but the impact can be minimised even though much of this knowledge is tacit.
People can work better together by being open to ideas and experience offered by others, and knowing how to get the best from information technology. This leads to real time savings and improvements in performance and quality.
An Intelligent Organisation applies these principles to achieve its strategic objectives, adapting quickly to a rapidly changing environment.
IDEAction can help you to assess how well your organisation is capturing and using the knowledge required for success. You will see where the priorities lie for improvement, and prepare an action plan to achieve early business benefits.
The IDEAction approach draws on experience and techniques developed at Scottish Enterprise and by the private sector. It's a flexible approach, adapted to suit the needs of each client.
Contact us to find out how we can work with your organisation to achieve better results by working better with knowledge.
Read more about the experience and the techniques referred to above in the About Us section, or in the more detailed pages listed below:
Types and uses of knowledge in organisations
Learning from success and failure - action-based learning
Obstacles to knowledge sharing and learning
Resilience and Sustainability
What do we mean by "resilience"? Is it the same as "sustainability"? If not, what are they differences?
There is a lot of discussion these days about "resilient communities" and "resilient cities", for example in connection with adaptation to climate change. If cities and communities have considered the risks presented by disruptive climate change such as severe weather, flooding and high temperatures, and planned how they will respond to these risks, then they are boosting their resilience.
But is "resilience" becoming another trendy buzzword that is itself at risk of becoming too broad to be useful - a bit like "sustainability"? These questions are explored in more detail (click on heading above), and feedback and comments are welcome.
Plastic bags and the impact of a story
Finally Gordon Brown has stolen a march on his cautious environment secretary Hilary Benn by saying that he wants to see an end to the use of billions of free plastic shopping bags every year in Britain. Could it be that a simple story about wildlife in Hawaii has persuaded him, where no amount of reasoned argument has succeeded in the past?
Learning from our experience - a practical example
The latest calls in the UK Parliament for an inquiry into the Iraq War highlight the importance of learning from our experience. Too often it takes a high-profile debacle such as this before organisations and politicians are forced into holding an inquiry, whereas really we should be aiming to review projects and business activities on a regular basis in order to improve our performance in the future.
