The economic, social and technological environment in which companies carry out their activities in the present and are going to carry them out, probably in the near future, is an environment characterized increasingly by complexity and by its unstable and changing nature, derived of a diversity of changes, mergers, globalizations and groupings.
The role that information technologies have as precursors of these changes, make today's society receive the name of Information Society on many occasions. In this Information Society, the main factor in wealth creation is knowledge. For this reason it is also called the Knowledge Society.
Wealth is not only generated by the accumulation of material and monetary goods, since they are only an expression of the transformation of the tacit and explicit knowledge of each individual, to achieve a need or simply innovate.
Defined in today's environment, the main source of sustainable competitive advantages lies in what the company knows (knowledge), how it uses what it knows (knowledge management) and its ability to learn new things (innovation).
The Knowledge Management in Organizations aims to capture, classify, use and re-create information and knowledge that is transformed into products and / or services that generate value.
We can graph the path followed by the transformation of data in a Knowledge Society:
Data -> Information -> Knowledge
The transformation of data to information and later, through a cognitive process, to knowledge, involves the incorporation of value in each of these elements. By themselves, data is simply a characteristic of something that exists. Knowledge is the meaning we give to the information we receive, that is, the exploitation of it to achieve a goal.
Within an organization like Banamex SA, information and knowledge become increasingly precious resources, therefore, the creation of specialized profiles to use them is more than required. Therefore, the figures of:
- Information Administrator Information Architect Knowledge Administrator Information and Knowledge Analyst and, Content Administrator in electronic media
They are the new protagonists of a process of change, in the classic and still bureaucratic structures that exist in our company.
The incorporation of technologies derived from the WEB such as the Internet, email, discussion forums, online conversations, intranet's, etc., convert information and knowledge as highly valuable resources that pass through our hands and eyes, without ourselves, let's have a notion of "how much they are worth".
All this must be accompanied by a corporate strategy, around organizational changes, that is, the generation of an organizational culture that allows knowledge to be shared at each level of the organization.
The companies with the highest performance and productivity are those that know how to use knowledge as a highly valuable and transformable resource. We cannot understand the success of companies like Microsoft, where the generation of value is the result of the creation of knowledge applied to computer programs. At Banamex, we also generate value, the result of the application of knowledge in each of its business areas.
Now we only have to "know how to manage that wealth." That is the challenge that the new Administration requires.
