Introduction
The concept "Knowledge Management" is in fashion. Also, all companies need to use it and actually do. What entrepreneur is unaware that he and his employees need continuous learning and training to be more effective, to improve customer service, to reduce costs and to innovate? In short, to be more competitive.
It is not necessary to convince anyone that the true competitive advantages lie more and more in intangibles and less and less in tangible elements, machinery, production equipment, facilities, etc. All of this can be bought; However, there are no markets to acquire knowledge, procedures, and means to improve customer service; to improve relations with the fundamental suppliers of our company, because we are their clients and we expect from them at least the same treatment that we intend to give to ours; to improve internal processes because our experience tells us that the same equipment, machines and media can be more or less profitable depending on the people who use them; Because we are convinced that only permanent innovation will allow us to continue in the market.
The environment in which companies operate has changed, and so have their assets. The most valuable and productive do not appear on the balance sheets; With traditional tools, we also do not know how they influence our income statements.
The financial indicators are insufficient because they do not inform us if we are improving our competitive advantages, if our relationships with customers and suppliers are getting better. And, above all, because accounting and its financial statements tell us about the past but not about the present, let alone the future. Managing the SME based on accounting is like driving guided by the rearview mirror.
Aware of this lack, two eminent North American professors, Kaplan and Norton, created the Balanced Scorecard (CMI) which proposes that companies think, analyze and measure four perspectives.
The financial perspective. The numbers, the balance sheets and the profit and loss accounts.
The customer perspective. Think and identify the types of clients, the markets, evaluating their profitability, loyalty, their acquisition costs, ways of retaining them.
The processes perspective. Try to identify those internal processes that add value to the customer. Of course, some or many of these processes do not contribute to maximizing the satisfaction of the client, or of the internal client, but we will have to ask ourselves their need and their cost.
The learning and growth perspective… One of the most important pillars on which the three previous perspectives are based is the ability of the company and those who work in it to learn and grow continuously. If in general learning cannot be separated from work, in SMEs there is no learning without work or work without learning. They are both the same thing.
The success of any company, large, medium or micro depends ultimately on its ability to meet the needs and expectations of those who work in it and those who are related to it (suppliers, customers, society or the community in which operate, etc.).
The WCC as a Tool
In this document we present our point of view of the generation and management of knowledge in SMEs.
In any type of company or organization, knowledge is conceived as the set of capabilities that provide stakeholders in the company with better performance, the fruits of which are the improvement of financial and non-financial results in the medium and long term, of the relations between all the participants, and between them and the company; in short, the development, growth and survival of the company.
In SMEs, this linking of efforts with results must be even more visible, and in the short term because their resources (financial, structure and support activities, and above all time) are even scarcer than those of larger companies.
Any program of work with SMEs must be very careful with the language. Otherwise, the entrepreneur will most likely listen to impressive "gurus" and then conclude: "It's fine, but I can't apply it." It is not that there is a language for "smart" and another for "clumsy", but to keep in mind that the vocabulary used is closely linked to the technologies and people available in companies. For example, if we use terms such as SAP, WAP in workshops or seminars; we quote "gurus" like Porter or Hamel; we propose to carry out expensive surveys; "We have to strengthen our R&D department", the same terminology we use is not only distancing us from the entrepreneur, but we may be transfusing him with a certain pessimism: "This is all very well but, as always,I cannot apply it to my company, because I have no means. I am condemned to continue being an SME ”.
In this frame of reference, we are convinced that any knowledge management training program for SMEs should start by offering simple and valuable, scalable tools, that is, they can be used with more or less breadth and complexity because although they are all SMEs, this concept It includes small workshops and even freelancers, and companies with turnover of tens of millions of euros. Starting with the implementation of the tools, the program can advance by developing the strategic and organizational concepts that justify the application of the tools, which can allow for graduation or escalation of the tool components.
The CMI is a tool that helps entrepreneurs and managers to articulate their objectives (which are generally based on their values and expectations) and also to measure them in order to compare them and communicate them to those who work with them. But the communication issue is not so important in SMEs (we all see each other and speak formally and especially informally). Much more important is that the entrepreneur / manager think and formulate what their strategic vision is, communicate it to their workers and to other stakeholders.
In order for the CMI not to remain a simple “Dashboard”, the measurements must be linked to the purpose and objectives of the company, through cause-effect relationships that in our method are established through the causal loops of the dynamics of systems popularized by Peter Senge in his books "The fifth discipline" and "The fifth discipline in practice".
We translate as “interested participants” the English expression “stakeholders”, which are all those people or groups interested in the proper functioning and survival of the company: employees, customers, suppliers, shareholders, and society in general.
