People-focused knowledge management

Innumerable
Nano Actions
Micro
Action
Micro
Action
Micro
Action
Micro
Action
Consolidated
Enterprise
Behavior
Individual
Positions
Departments
and
Business
Functions
The Enterprise
Figure 2-1
The effective-acting enterprise achieves its performance by diligent application of
personal knowledge and structural intellectual capital assets. Copyright © 2000
Knowledge Research Institute, Inc. Reproduced with permission.
The enterprise is a collection of closely coupled systems in which
the performance of each department or subsystem will affect the
operations of other subsystems.
2
From strategic and enterprise per-
formance points of view, the overall behavior of the enterprise deter-
mines its success. However, the overall performance is made up of
the micro actions and performances of each department — the sales
department, manufacturing department, R&D department, customer
service department, etc. The actions and resulting performance of
each department are again made up from the smaller nano actions
and behaviors of individual people who hold positions within the
departments. As indicated in Figure 2-1, the consolidated enterprise
behavior, its overall performance, is the result of these countless nano
and micro actions — the personal actions of everyone in the enter-
prise and anyone else who is acting on the enterprise’s behalf. For
the overall performance to be good, the actions by people must 
be good.
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The Effective Enterprise
33
Effective Enterprises Rely on Broad and Deep Knowledge
Proactive managers emphasize that knowledge, particularly per-
sonal understanding of both work and enterprise intents, is the 
principal force behind the effective enterprise. Managers promote
viability by developing, cumulating, and deploying competitive
knowledge. They expect that these actions will foster proper and
effortless handling of routine and simple tasks and that non-routine
and complex tasks will be handled in a timely way and competently
in the best interest of all parties. They believe that consistent effec-
tive behavior secures competitive leadership and the ability to pursue
opportunities and render services that could not be delivered other-
wise. For these reasons they choose to manage knowledge explicitly
and systematically.
Overall enterprise performance — the degree to which enterprise
objectives are fulfilled — is determined by the effectiveness of count-
less separate actions performed by individuals and groups — that is,
how well regular situations and difficult challenges are handled.
Organizational effectiveness is determined by many factors, the most
important being the quality and availability of pertinent knowledge
at points-of-action used to handle situations — that is, to make sense
of information, innovate, decide what to do, act, and evaluate the
implications of approaches and actions. Other factors, not covered
in this book, include the mentalities and motivations of individuals
and organizational characteristics that shape and channel individual
actions into desirable and effective enterprise actions. In addition,
many manage to create highly effective enterprises with low internal
friction and self-energizing and rewarding work environments that
operate with little wasted effort.
Important enterprise situations vary widely. Some work situations,
such as fast, reliable, and error-free assembly, are well known and
require routine, even automatized knowledge. Other work situa-
tional, such as project work to find solutions to stubborn operating
problems, are complex and require extensive, at times abstract,
knowledge and metaknowledge. Even in well-known routine cases,
effective situation-handling involves many steps and requires spe-
cialized knowledge to support the primary situation-handling tasks
of Sensemaking, Decision-Making/Problem-Solving, Implementation,
and Monitoring as discussed in Chapter 5.
One important focus of this book deals with the relationship
between knowledge and other intellectual capital (IC) assets and the
situation-handling tasks and methods that people and organizations
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34
People-Focused Knowledge Management
utilize to act effectively. Our purpose is to guide efforts to strengthen
knowledge-related capabilities and to facilitate their use as they 
are built with the aid of deliberate and systematic management of
knowledge-related practices and processes — that is, systematic 
and deliberate KM.
Similar steps are required for both simple and complex personal
situation-handling cases and for organizational situation-handling.
Many business problems are appreciably knowledge-related, as are
many business opportunities. Unfortunately, there is a shortage of
insights into business-related knowledge processes. The situation-
handling model presented in Chapters 5 and 6 provides an aggre-
gated framework to understand how to deal with knowledge-based
activities. The model portrays processes associated with delivering
competent work that is aligned with the enterprise’s intents. It does
not deal with learning or innovation mechanisms. Nor does it detail
mechanisms within the primary tasks.