Intellectual Capital- Is it the Holy Grail to Success

Implementation of Knowledge management in organization
Most scholars and visionaries say that current world is going through an era which is known as the knowledge era. In 1998 Thomas mentioned that we are entering the “information age” from the industrial age, where raw materials, machineries were the key to success of the business. But as technologies change rapidly the market is very volatile and organization has to act according to the market. Thomas also argues that knowledge has always been important to humans and has proven to be the key to success he has mentioned some examples to justify his point and one of them was primitive warriors learned to make weapons out of iron to win over their peers who used stones.(Stewart, 1998) So knowledge has always been important but now it seems to more be important then ever as we are in midst of “economic revolution” and one has to understand the importance of intellectual capital to gain the competitive edge.
On the other hand Sunassee and Sewry redefined the same concept as “Knowledge age” or “Knowledge Economy”. (2003) where it would be very difficult to predict or keep track of changes brought by knowledge and that in turn affect the economy. Economists refer to such knowledge as “Heterogeneous resource” (Stewart 1998). Whenever organizations tried to tap the knowledge they have the dilemma of deciding what the important knowledge that would give them the competitive advantage. The intellectual capital can be categorized into three forms; they are human capital, structural capital and customer capital. (Soliman, Spooner 2000) They also identified the general processes followed by organizations to capitalize on their employee’s collective knowledge to implement knowledge management and they are; Create, capture, organise, access and use knowledge. It appears that this concept was inspired by nonaka’s seci model (1994).
Organizations with desire to manage knowledge or want to safe guard their intellectual capital, they must align knowledge strategy with the organizational strategy and mention explicitly in polices about their expectations from their employees regarding the sharing of knowledge and coming up with innovative ideas that would give their organization the competitive edge in the market. Daniel (1993) argues that in order to make this possible organization should understand the basic difference between individual and organizational learning (Klein 1998) and he did propose a framework in order to link the individual learning to the organizational learning and if their is a clear understanding of this transfer process, then organizations can align this learning process with their mission, vision and goals. Although the proposed framework is considerably good, it would not be fully efficient as we have very little knowledge about the psychology and working of human minds.
In addition to this it is interesting to know that does size of the organization have an adverse effect on Knowledge management. A study was conducted by Sandra and Rodney (2003) to understand if the organizational size has anything to do with knowledge management issues. They made a survey using the knowledge management model developed by Moffett in 2002 known as MeCTIP which are the components of this KM model and the acronym expands to Macro environment, Culture, Technology, Information, People. The result of the survey was small sized organizations had the least loss of knowledge and on the other hand large sized organization had the maximum damage. The reasons for this might be that in small organization each employee gets individual attention and quite the opposite in the large organization.
An example of knowledge sharing can be found in the Italian motorsport industry which is highly fragmented with many motorsport companies and it is well known as ‘Motor Valley’. These companies are in business from over a century and the competency and skills acquired over a period of time and these are the important elements of the economic development of the motor engineering industry. The focus is on Italy-F1 which focused in manufacturing all the parts of the racing vehicle. In order to involve in learning and knowledge management they promoted three processes; culture of ‘working together’, co-location and use of resident engineers and shared education and training. (Mariotti 2007) All the employees of Italy-F1 were treated as family members and Italy-F1 as an organization kept the same type of relationship with their suppliers. They conducted annual meetings to share their experience. The idea to use resident engineers worked very well as all were from the same place they had same culture and were like-minded so it was easy to glue them together. They conducted many shared training programmes which facilitated them to learn new capabilities and techniques.
By examining the above example it is possible to come to a conclusion that implementing knowledge management in an organization is possible but it would depend on the organization, its market and customers it serves.


References
•Fawzy Soliman and Keri Spooner., 2000, Strategies for Implementing knowledge management: role of human resources management, Journal of Knowledge Management Volume 4, pp 337-345

•Thomas A. Stewart., 1998, Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth Of Organizations.

•David A. Klein., 1998, The Strategic Management of Intellectual Capital.

•Sandra Moffett and Rodney MCAdam., 2006, The Effects of Organizational Size on Knowledge Management Implementation, Total Quality Management Vol. 17, No. 2, pp 221–241.

•Francesca Mariotti, 2007, Learning to Share Knowledge in the Italian Motorsport Industry, Knowledge and Process Management, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp 81–94.

•Nakkiran N. Sunassee AND David A. Sewry., 2002, A Theoretical Framework for Knowledge Management Implementation, Proceedings of SAICSIT 2002, pp 235 – 245.

Overview of Web 2.0 technologies

Web 2.0 is the term used in general and considered as a new phase of World Wide Web. It should not be mistaken as a new technology but instead it is a second generation of web development. Web 2.0 is not restricted to blogs, social networks, RSS, tags but also deals with how these next generation websites cater the end users requirements. (Krasne 2005) The word web 2.0 was coined by Dale Dougherty and Craig Cline but got much publicity after the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Conference in 2004. On the other hand some consider web 2.0 technologies as being overhyped or just another “meaningless marketing buzzword”. (O’Reilly 2005) Whereas web usability guru Jakob (2007) referred Web 2.0 as a new trend and that the web firms are unnecessarily making effort to personalize the website and neglecting the basic functions. (Nielsen 2007)

A blog or weblog in simple form can be explained as a personal diary with combination of technology, (Efimova 2004) it is similar to updating a web page but the major difference is that blogs uses linear posting (Felix, stolarz 2006) i.e. each new post overlaps the old posts and general public could express their opinion in the form of comments which was not possible in the normal website pages. According to Rebecca (2000) weblog was originally a “link driven websites”. Rebecca blood categorizes weblogs into three basic types they are filters which contains links to external websites, second is the personal journals which contains internal information i.e. blogger’s personal diary and third is the notebook which contains both internal and external contents For e.g.: essays. But Krishnamurthy classifies blogs into four types in two dimensions, personal vs. topical, individual vs. Community. (Herring et al 2004)


Figure 1 Types of blogs (Herring et al 2004)

and Dave winer(1999) adds to that the credit of creating the first weblog goes to Tim Berners-Lee from CERN which was more like a web site and he created a link to all the new websites that came online and this archive is available at world wide web consortium[w3c]

Another popular term which is a part of web 2.0 technology is Real Simple Syndication. (RSS)
Will argues RSS “as a format for aggregating web content in one place”. (Richardson 2005) It
is popularly known as news feeds. The best part of RSS feed is that it is a free to use and on top
of that it acts like a filter by blocking all the unnecessary spam, advertisements and collects all
the new contents from all the subscribed websites. RSS can be a very powerful tool from a
business context. For e.g. a project that involves lot of research, sharing new information
among the members would be very difficult and this can be overcome by automatically sharing
new information or links using RSS feed (Cold 2006)

One of the best uses of web 2.0 technologies can be found in SAP who recently launched SAP Developer Network [SDN] which is a online community that involved all developers, implementers, administrators working with SAP Net Weaver and other composite applications. To everyone’s surprise there was a overwhelming response in positive way. The site had access to all technical articles, sample codes, learning tools, weblogs, discussion forum were experts shared their knowledge by answering the doubts posted by other employees. The website was open to all SAP technologists around the world. Even thought SAP created this platform it was a success because of the users who made the community robust and interesting by sharing. (Sap news desk 2004)
This was a success story of web 2.0 technology, one might argue that the success was obvious as all the users involved were from technical background but the situation would be completely different when non technical users are involved.

References:
• Efimova, Lilia, Discovering the iceberg of knowledge work: A weblog case.
Available: https://doc.telin.nl/dsweb/Get/Version-9466/OKLC_Efimova.pdf [Accessed on: 26/03/2009].

• Richardson, Will. The ABCs of RSS,
Available: http://www.techlearning.com/article/3984 [Accessed on: 26/03/2009].

• Nielsen, Jakob. BBC NEWS technology web 2.0 'neglecting good design'.
Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6653119.stm [Accessed on: 27/03/2009].

• Winer, Dave. The history of weblogs.
Available: http://oldweblogscomblog.scripting.com/historyOfWeblogs [Accessed on: 28/03/2009].

• Blood, Rebecca. weblogs: A history and perspective.
Available: http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html [Accessed on: 28/03/2009].

• SAP News Desk - SAP DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL.
Available: http://sap.sys-con.com/node/44272 [Accessed on: 28/03/2009].

• O’reilly, Tim. what is web 2.0 - O'reilly media.
Available: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html [Accessed on: 29/03/2009].

• Cold, S. Jeff, Using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to Enhance Student Research. ACM SIGITE Newsletter 2006
Available: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1113378.1113379 [Accessed on: 29/03/2009].


• Krasne, Alexandra. What is web 2.0 anyway? 2005
Available:http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/archives/page9344.cfm?cg=searchterms&sg=web 2.0 [29/03/2009].

• HERRING, S.C., SCHEIDT, L.A., BONUS, S. and WRIGHT, E. Bridging the gap: a genre analysis of Weblogs, 2004. Available:http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1265271&isnumber=28293 [29/03/2009].