How to Apply Knowledge Management to Competitive Advantage

With an ever-growing wealth of information available quickly to anyone with an Internet connection, knowledge management has become more important than ever. Especially for larger businesses, it is essential to be able to leverage your knowledge to bring yourself a competitive advantage over others in your field. One key to this is knowledge management.

Instructions

1. Determine whether you are attempting to create a competitive advantage based on cost (cheaper for your consumers), quality (higher quality at same cost for your consumers) or niche marketing (target a different segment by offering different options than your competitors, which cannot be easily compared).

2. Increase productivity in your office by applying effective organizational knowledge management. By structuring your knowledge processes to allow those with the necessary knowledge to quickly share or apply it, you can reduce wasteful meetings and inefficient knowledge bottlenecks. This will help you get more work hours from your employees and create a cost advantage.

3. Bring technological solutions to knowledge dispersal, such as internal company wikis. By offering easier, more intuitive ways for your employees to create and share knowledge, your company can produce more and better knowledge than your competitors, thus gaining a quality advantage.

4. Foster and reward the sharing of knowledge. Whether creating master/apprentice relationships or monetarily rewarding those who share knowledge within your company, take steps to ensure that every employee is trying to share useful knowledge.

5. Pay attention to what your employees learn. Sharing knowledge is not good if you don't act on it. Good knowledge management generally leads to the identification of unmet needs. These needs can often be the seeds of a new niche market, allowing you to gain a competitive advantage by addressing these needs before anyone else.

Tips & Warnings

• Talk to your employees frequently, and be aware of what they are thinking about.

• Good knowledge management is only as good as your staff's knowledge. Hire quality people; otherwise, no amount of internal knowledge management can help.