People-focused knowledge management

Comments: Parity’s management confronted a challenging
situation familiar to many management teams. Based on their
best understanding of the situation, in spite of all its uncertain-
ties and conflicting and partial information, they decided to
pursue a proactive and comprehensive approach that required
innovative Problem-Solving to determine what to do. Their goal
was to re-create Parity to be successful in the long term. Their
management philosophy was that they needed to rely on a loyal
and effective workforce — to an even greater extent than previ-
ously. All these factors produced a complex situation.
There were several knowledge-related aspects of this case. Clearly,
Parity’s management team was very knowledgeable and had good
understanding of its market, its capabilities, and how to make the
organization operate effectively. However, to pursue its aggressive
strategy, management needed to build additional knowledge capa-
bilities. It needed to increase its R&D intellectual capital and also
prepare its general workforce to understand how to participate in
implementing the strategy in detail.
Enterprise Decision-Making
Much enterprise Decision-Making is immediate and often routine.
Experienced managers respond to a myriad of varying situations,
most of which are familiar — or nearly familiar to them. Work 
performed by rank-and-file employees is often immediate and routine
and consists of well-established tasks and practices. Hence, to perform
such work, proficient managers and other employees are often able
to operationalize and execute personal mental reference models 
to perform their jobs. Within the enterprise one frequently finds 
Enterprise Situation-Handling
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that much work is performed by another class of Decision-Making
cases that include predesigned responses embedded in automated
functions such as payroll systems and in other types of systems and
procedures.