Technology is not paramount if before there was not an adequate culture to get the best out of them, so the heads of organizations must be concerned with training workers before introducing them.
The current scientific-technical revolution, the overflow of information, and the globalization of economies, caused by the appearance of the Internet, has resulted in knowledge becoming an emerging and differentiating factor between poverty and wealth, which it has brought with it the emergence of a new discipline for its administration, distribution and use; Knowledge Management.
Now, what is Knowledge Management?
There is a great variety of concepts given by different researchers to Knowledge Management; But everyone agrees that Knowledge Management is a continuous process of acquisition, distribution (in time and form to those who need it) and analysis of the information that moves in the organization's environment to make its workers more intelligent (be understood as more creative and innovative) and in this way be more precise in decision-making, respond more quickly to market needs, obtain sustainable development and be more competitive in this highly turbulent, changing and uncertain environment.
Although it may seem like a recent activity, Knowledge Management has always been a decisive factor in the rise of civilizations and organizations. For at least 60,000 years, the men of Cro-Magnon lived simultaneously with those of Neanderthal. About 30.00 years ago these disappeared. Why did one species survive and the other perish if both used tools and languages? The Cro-Magnon men had a lunar calendar and correlated this course of days with the migratory habits of the bison, elk, and red deer. This perception was documented in cave paintings and in series of 28 notches on deer antlers. The Cro-Magnon man learned that it was enough for him to lie in wait on certain days, javelin in hand, in the passage of a river, while the Neanderthal man dispersed his resources and men in search of occasional encounters. He misallocated his resources and disappeared.
But how did the Cro-Magnon man get the knowledge about migratory habits? No doubt through multiple observations made by different individuals at various stages. ¿ What would have happened if the first Cro-Magnon who observed the migratory habits of the animals had not reported his observation to his fellows ? Knowledge would have been lost with him and others from Cro-Magnon would have had to start again, from the beginning.
- The Cro-Magnon man used the technological methods available at the time - paintings and deer antlers - to pass on his knowledge to his descendants. Over time, he accumulated the knowledge of multiple observers, becoming able to plan his hunting activities with increasing efficiency. The end result was that the Cro-Magnon man was much more competitive than the Neanderthal man, and managed to succeed in a market where survival was at stake.
After this anecdote, the following reflection should be made: Many people think that in automation or introducing telecommunications and computer technologies in the organization, if a culture of making the most of them is not rooted before, it is solving all the problems of the organization; This is a serious error.
It is true that computers speed up work and allow knowledge to spread throughout the organization or the world faster, and that in the course of the last forty years, organizations have invested billions of dollars to automate tasks. previously made manually. Automation undoubtedly allows you to perform some tasks more quickly; but, basically, they are doing the same jobs and that means that there have been no fundamental improvements in performance and also when they are not well used, they can be detrimental to organizations as they can contribute to the creation of barriers and obstacles to learning, innovation and creativity, derived from their most significant disadvantage,They isolate man from society and a great barrier appears between lovers of society and apathetic, who in most cases are the ones with the most important implicit knowledge.
I think that in this new economic era, where more and more mistakes are unforgivable, organizations before introducing these technologies, should first be concerned with creating an organizational culture that facilitates the sharing of knowledge and when this is achieved then make it appear that the Technologies are the best means to achieve this; first the need or the problem and then the solution, and not as in most cases, the means and then we see so that it can serve us. New technologies of telecommunications and computing are a tool and not a fashion !
This new era differs from the others in that while in the agrarian economy, land determined who won and who lost, and in the industrial economy, the well-known value chain of M. Porter was the basis of competitiveness, in the "Internet economy" new rules are created by knowledge, time and information. An increasing part of economic activities is concentrating on the creation, manipulation and distribution of information. So if everything that is done and invested is not directed according to these aspects, it can be said that the future of the organization is being played with.
All this has brought, as a consequence, that the competitive fight becomes more rigorous in conditions of an extraordinary increase in labor productivity that is reflected in costs and product quality. The role of competitive advantages created in relation to natural advantages grows in competitiveness.
Who was going to say that 30 years ago that small and medium-sized companies with a reduced workforce and without a long history; but with a high level of qualification they were going to displace, as a trend, the traditional large companies with abundant manpower, generally low-skilled, with a high technological level; reason why the qualification of the personnel becomes the main advantage of the companies, to the point that the main factor to measure the value of the organizations at present is their intellectual capital (their human resources, their relationship with clients and their organizational structures.)
To conclude, we can affirm that technology is not paramount if before there was not an adequate culture to get the best out of them, so those responsible for organizations should be concerned with training workers before introducing them, due to that we have had to live in a time when constant training of personnel has become a competitive advantage.
