The productive factor par excellence of the current era is knowledge. This is the factor that serves as leverage to the growing and rapid technological change.
In an era marked by population explosion and pollution, technology will undoubtedly be fundamental to finding solutions to the problems that must plague the entire world.
For organizations of any nature, and especially for companies generating goods and services, knowledge management, combined with creativity and innovative capacity, is clearly a critical factor when it comes to subsisting and competing in global markets.
Managing knowledge implies carrying out the functions of planning, organization, direction and control, with the purpose and objective of acquiring, generating and enhancing the concepts and ideas necessary to improve the quality and value delivered to customers, while increasing the financial profitability of the company.
In a constantly changing and evolving environment, it is necessary that the members of the organization, be they managers or employees, have up-to-date knowledge of the needs of customers and consumers, their requirements, and new production techniques and methods.
Knowledge management must clearly serve to overcome customs, especially when they impede the organization's normal and effective response to new environmental requirements. Knowledge management will thus be crucial to overcome ineffective paradigms, as well as those myths that make it difficult to find answers to new and pressing problems.
The problems we suffer will not be overcome with the ideas that contributed to generating them, but with new and innovative ideas. Generating these new ideas is the raison d'être of knowledge management.
Companies are considering a repositioning in terms of "knowing". The accumulated knowledge has begun to be questioned, being necessary to have people who can see things from another perspective.
Companies that fail to update and professionalize their people will be left behind and delayed. Although training is one of the pillars in the development of human resources, only the formulation of a comprehensive personnel policy will enable the intellectual and operational growth of the agents of an organization.
The turbulence of the aforementioned changes can only be faced with the best trained, flexible and alert people to change and with a new and clear vision of the business.
Training
Training in the work order is the set of activities through which the knowledge and aptitude of an employee in the performance of assigned tasks is increased. As Juan Carlos Ayala and Miguel Ángel Vicente well say, no company or entity can choose between training or not, the only possibility is to choose the method.
Training enables increased productivity, contributes to increased morale, ensures the stability of the organization and its flexibility, contributes to incentives, reduces the need for supervision, and significantly reduces the levels of failures or errors.
Thus, training is a strategic activity, contributing by investing in it to increase the returns obtained more than proportionally.
Improving knowledge in terms of quality, but above all training for the application leads to reducing the number of defects per million opportunities, and with it an increase in productivity levels, logically accompanied by a reduction in costs and a greater customer and consumer satisfaction.
It is not the same to generate a mere knowledge, than to train someone to understand and understand the need for change, both personal and company, in order to obtain certain and certain results considered fundamental in order to achieve a competitive advantage.
In an era of constant change, it is essential to train to unlearn and relearn with increasing speed and flexibility. The continuous changes in the environment force to constantly modify the paradigms, so that they continue to be useful for the daily work of the organization.
Training is not an expense but an investment and for this reason it must be planned and projected as such, anticipating its profitability and closely following the results it generates for the organization.
Human Resources Inventories
Few companies have software designed to permanently carry information intended to know what skills and attitudes the existing staff have in them.
What are their experiences, their knowledge, their tastes, their abilities, their training. Given the need to continually plan the tactical and strategic needs of personnel for the future, it is essential to know with what human capabilities and which must be generated internally or obtained from abroad.
Companies that are very well positioned today may lack the human capabilities necessary to face the future not only in the medium and long term, but even in the short term. Personnel are available to efficiently execute the current production processes, the question is:
do these personnel have the knowledge, experiences and skills for the new work systems that are already being implemented in the industry? If human resources represent one of the most precious, if not the most, assets in any business, the fact that their capabilities can quickly become obsolete should be cause for concern.
Intellectual assets largely represent that ability of workers, administrative and managerial personnel to face new realities and challenges. To the extent that the staff does not have the ability to react quickly and effectively to new circumstances, the company will be in trouble.
New construction methods and materials, new services in banking and finance, new means of advertising, new medical treatments, new forms of cultivation, new production systems, are all just a very small sample of the changes that have occurred every day. day modify the demands on the needs in labor matters.
Staff to remain productive and competitive must continually renew their knowledge and capabilities. This generates a new business possibility in educational matters: training and training aimed at continuous re-education for competitiveness. Constantly re-adapt paradigms, train in new disciplines and technological requirements (machines and supplies), train in quality, productivity, planning, teamwork, motivation and leadership.
Managing experiences
In any organization, with the passage of time and the incorporation of new personnel, experiences accumulate, the question is to make explicit that accumulation of experiences so that they can be useful to the organization and its members in the fulfillment of their functions..
Through planned and organized meetings, under the direction of a facilitator, this exchange of experiences is feasible, whether they have taken place within the organization, or outside it in other companies, as a service provider or as a consumer of the same..
Companies cannot continue to vilify the work experiences and experiences of their staff. These are always possessors of unique and particular experiences, which can be transferred and shared with the rest of the staff, thus contributing to the formation of a group intelligence.
The sum of individual experiences, knowledge and skills will never become as strong and decisive as group intelligence. To make this feasible, excellent communication is essential.
This communication conceived as the free and fluid transmission of knowledge, experiences, data and information is much more than the consideration of the means used to make it a reality. It implies a posture, a decision and a culture, which should be accompanied by the means that make it more effective. For this reason, today the use of computer systems as facilitators of communication and archiving of information is critical, as they help to generate relevant results for the organization.
Diversity as a fertilizer element
Adding new experiences, new visions, new perspectives, thus generating new possibilities of achieving a "cross fertilization" among the members of an organization allows generating new and powerful paradigms, new and fruitful ideas, resulting in greater creativity and consequently a higher degree of innovation.
Staff members of different sexes, ages, ethnicities, religions, regions, and when possible and necessary from different nationalities, from different professions, coming from different types of companies and industries and from different academic centers, give a company the context to generate a greater and more varied generation of ideas.
For a company, having managerial staff from the same university implies shutting oneself up within certain ideas and dogmas, preventing them from evolving in other directions. In the same way, any composition of personnel that tends to similarity will imply impossibility of growth and diversification for the company. The greater the degree of similarities the greater the risks for an organization.
For this reason, diversity should be considered as a critical factor for the sustainable competitiveness of the company. If all the personnel have the same perspective and respond to similar paradigms, the organization will be unable to generate new ideas and concepts, its creative power will be notably impoverished and the lack of diversity will prevent it from understanding the changes in the environment.
Provoking the dialectical process
The best way to advance in the field of knowledge is always bearing in mind that every idea must confront its opposite, in order to create a new idea that is a synthesis that overcomes these contradictions. Each individual, group of individuals and the organization must be sensitized and prone to receive criticism and contradictions between theory and reality, in order to make possible the growth and evolution of thought and knowledge.
Anchoring an idea, freezing concepts, avoiding or rejecting criticism or opposition, closing the mind, avoiding the different, are all trends that freeze a state of knowledge, which can end up being suicidal for an organization.
An organization and its members must always be ready to test their paradigms, their knowledge, their ideas and concepts, systematically discarding those that are no longer useful for the competitive performance of the company.
Rigid ideas tend to "break" by dragging organizations, while flexible ideas allow an organization to constantly re-adjust to new circumstances and situations. The motto is "readjust your ideas if you intend to continue to be useful to your organization and want it to be useful to the market."
The power of computing
The computer science under its new strategic conception must aim to facilitate communication between the individuals of the organization, must make feasible an optimal management of the inventory of human resources, making possible the accumulation of knowledge and experiences, having to allow to know what happens in the environment, especially capturing changes in the market and consumer taste.
A computer system that does not make possible the aspects listed in the previous paragraph does not have strategic value for the organization, preventing the development of group intelligence, which as previously said is a critical factor for the competitiveness of companies.
Having purely accounting and financial systems responds to the first phase in the evolution of computer science and business management. Today, when competition has become global and changes are constantly accelerating, it is necessary to adapt the means for generating added value and making decisions.
Conclusions
New times make new ways of thinking and seeing reality necessary. Ideas that were useful yesterday are most likely no longer useful today. Those who intend to remain competitive in handling perverse concepts will no longer have the ability to confront possibilities for success in the new fields of competition.
Faced with the change to organizations to remain feasible, there is only one possibility: to positively modify their knowledge and positions in the face of new realities. It is necessary to constantly rebuild ideas and concepts to make the organization viable in the medium and long term.
The tastes and needs of consumers are altered, the functioning of the economy as well, the social, technological, scientific and political changes reverberate day by day, making the market a factor in continuous evolution. Hence the urgent need to manage knowledge as a way to respond to continuous change. This is how knowledge management and change management are intertwined in the search for the competitive adaptation of the company to its environment.
Knowledge management must go far beyond the reaction to the changes that are generated, to become the architect of the promotion of change, generating new rules of the game.
Clarification: For more information on these and other ideas of the author, you are invited to visit:
Bibliography
Organizations Management - Larocca / Vicente - Ediciones Macchi - 1993
Modern Management - Robert Séller - Ediciones Macchi - 1994
Manage Knowledge - Probst / Raub / Romhardt - Prentice Hall - 2001
Total Productivity - John G. Belcher - Editorial Granica - 1991
PNL - The new science of personal excellence - Harry Alder - Editorial EDAF - 1994
The Seven Habits of Effective People - Stephen R. Covey - Paidós Editorial - 1989
