Newsletter topics: Critical Factor Needs Analysis (CFNA), Knowledge Management, Productivity, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Organization Structure, Priority Management

• The Problem Of Self Examination
• Knowledge Management Systems: It's Not What You Know... 
• It's All In The Details
• People Drive ERP Systems' Performance
• Defining A Company's Identity 
• A Violinist In The Metro -- Washington, D.C.

 

And contrary to popular expression, neither it is it whom you know.  I want to offer you a new mantra for successfully competing in the knowledge economy, and for developing a successful knowledge strategy.

It’s not what you know that counts,
it’s how fast you can access all the things you need to know.
When you can get your access time down to a few seconds, you can effectively know everything.  Provided, of course, that you know where it resides, and it is accessible.  And that is the key to effective knowledge strategy.

A knowledge management policy is not a knowledge strategy.  A knowledge strategy should not stop with knowledge management.  A knowledge strategy should not start with knowledge management.  A knowledge strategy should begin with a strategy for extracting value from knowledge.

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How often are we told, it’s all in the details? 

If you’ve ever misspelled the URL of your favorite website, you know you will not find it and occasionally end up on a site that would make many of us blush.  All you missed was one tiny little character and yet, you are nowhere near your destination.   Although we intuitively realize the importance of small details, we often take their presence for granted, frequently not even recognizing the major role they play in everything we do.  You can have the most cleverly designed and flawlessly organized presentation and yet, one small oversight, one misspoken word, food stuck between two teeth, showing up five minutes late, and all your efforts are in vain.  Does this sound familiar?  Good; you’re human.

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Why do people who ostensibly have the same start in the career race perform at different levels?  Despite the same standards of academic achievement, similar backgrounds, the same training, shared social skills and work experience, some individuals perform much better than others. Recent studies have shown that   our natural and learned skills through training and experience - the basics - only represent at best a 20% contribution to our performance. The remaining 80% which affects our performance comes from our personal skills - those crucial other elements such as our thinking and our behavioral aspects.  

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Internal positioning is the process of identifying who and what the organization is at three levels – the organization as a whole, the individual departments, and the individual employees – documenting the information in written documents, communicating the information across the organization, and maintaining the documents as information changes in the organization.  After reading this article, I hope to have given you some good reasons for going through an internal positioning process.

Identifying who and what the organization is at three levels:

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Bruce Newman is the editor-in-chief of the PI Newsletter. 

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