People-focused knowledge management

Comments: LearnsSys faced a typical business situation —
that of needing to restructure work to improve profitability. Ini-
tially, the team’s action space was constrained to business-
as-usual as is often the case, particularly when a change for the
better has already been implemented. For people who have been
part of implementation, the psychological cost of discarding
recent improvements is high. In LearnSys’s case, by introducing
a new paradigm — a new model and perspective — the team
was able to expand its Action Space to create new ways of han-
dling customers, proposals, project execution, and research and
development.
The knowledge-related aspects in this case included the “under-
standing flow” within the marketing-to-delivery process as indicated
in Figure 6-4. That paradigm provided the insights that allowed the
LearnSys team to expand its Action Space, which in turn led to its
innovative knowledge-bridging approach by assigning technology
experts to follow each project through all its stages.
Enterprise Innovation Capabilities
Competitiveness appears to be a function of the degree to which
an enterprise can innovate better and faster than its competitors. Its
Innovation Capabilities provide the ability to innovate and are a
result of many factors, such as enterprise culture and the mentalities
of its employees, the degrees to which people are free to engage in
Enterprise Situation-Handling
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creative and innovative activities, motivational factors and incentives,
exchanges of viewpoints, perspectives and knowledge within the
enterprise and with the outside, and the degree to which people
within the enterprise understand customers, customers’ customers,
and the marketplace.
Innovation is a human activity, and there are many approaches to
create an innovative environment within the enterprise. Among these
approaches are those that expose people to new ideas. Equally impor-
tant are approaches to expose people to novel needs and require-
ments. In addition, many organizations have discovered that creating
opportunities for people from different parts of the organization to
meet or work together often leads to innovative collaboration with
great results. Perhaps the most valuable innovations are those that
are associated with totally novel ideas and opportunities that are not
yet perceived by the marketplace or by customers. At other times,
opportunities are created by improving operations in ways that 
competitors have not understood as in the following illustration.
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People-Focused Knowledge Management
Marketing
&
Strategy
Setting