Open question: What does a flatter World mean in terms of organizational Knowledge Management?

This is to start a discussion thread on the impact of our World getting flatter - mainly due to technological advances - on Organizations and their efforts to leverage their value-added Knowledge. Note: To get a really good sense of this flattening of the World, I advise you to read "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century" by Thomas Friedman (2005)  http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/worldisflat.htm 

 Reem Saied gives a good short analysis of Freidman's book. http://reemsaied.blogspot.com/2005/05/world-is-flat.html 

 An initial assertion: A Flat World increases the power of individuals through their specific knowledge. Technological advances have made the World become “flat” and successful organizations of the future will be the ones that embrace this fact and take full advantage of it before their competitors. This increasingly flat World is described by Thomas Friedman as “[…] a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration – the sharing of knowledge and work – in real time, without regard to geography, distance, or, in the near future, even language”. In such a World, it is clear that the span of influence of each individual is virtually the entire World. 

The key value-adding differentiator for individuals is their specific knowledge (as the sum of their skills, competences and experiences, modulated by their interpersonal qualities and cultural background). Peter-Anthony Glick Leveraging Organizational Knowledge

Why all this fuss about KM now?

Knowledge Management is about how an organization makes use of its intellectual property. It is about leveraging the knowledge produced internally or acquired externally, to add value for competitive advantage. BUT WHY ALL THIS FUSS NOW? Organizations always produced knowledge and this knowledge must have been used to add value somehow => TRUE However, knowledge was not managed explicitly, formally, systematically because, until the 90's, it didn’t really need to be in order to add value. In the increasingly Flat World we live in - with weaker geographical and political borders - individual and organizational knowledge is the most rewarding asset to leverage. Find below examples of key benefits of Knowledge-driven initiatives in an organization:

• Stop “reinventing the wheel”. => Similar or different solutions are applied to identical problems by different teams throughout the organization, when one solution could be applied for all. What are needed are processes and tools to facilitate knowledge encoding and accessibility. It must be facilitated to find out what has been done and who has done it.
• Induce a “Knowledge is power when it is shared” culture. What is needed is a top-management will and drive for a knowledge sharing culture, in which individuals, departments, teams, companies are encouraged, valued and rewarded for sharing their specific knowledge.
• Effective replacement of experienced staff through knowledge acquisition and transfer. A fraction of the significant costs associated with staff turnover could be directed towards proactive knowledge transfer from senior staff to more junior ones. Training, Coaching, apprenticeship, documentation are only some of the methods that could be generalized.
• A company-wide team spirit or the systematic involvement of all the relevant stakeholders in projects and activities, all sharing specific and valuable knowledge and experience. “When knowledge gained somewhere doesn’t move elsewhere, that’s not a learning organization; that’s just a bunch of projects” (Jac Fitz-Enz, HR analyst, founder of the Saratoga Institute). What is first needed is for individuals and groups of people to be encouraged and valued for using their own knowledge and experience to constructively challenge the production of others. Furthermore, positive and negative feedback from all parties involved in projects and activities should be formally collected and made freely available to all for re-use (this relates to first and last examples as well).
• Stop making the same mistakes twice (or many more times). The risk of repeating mistakes can be considerably reduced with the generalization of relatively simple processes and tools, all centred on the principle of proactive knowledge sharing. In other words, the reasons and impacts of a mistake along with what was done about it is to be systematically recorded in a database available for others to consult.

I found on Pera the Innovation Company's website (www.pera.com) this very good support for knowledge-driven stategies:

"Global Knowledge A Knowledge Based Business... The best businesses today recognised a long time ago that their use of knowledge would be key to making them successful and they did something about it! These businesses: Thrive on chaos and uncertainty because it confuses their competitors Welcome globalisation because it gives them access to customers and capabilities that their competitors are yet to comprehend exist Welcome reduced product lifecycles because they know they are agile enough to get in and out of these new business spaces at speeds others can only imagine Can be sure that China is not a threat because they know that the value they create comes from the man and not the machine But what did they do? Divorced themselves of the corporate mindset and released the spirit of the individual Developed their human capital first and then watched their financial capital multiply Looked across the business and to the world at large for inspiration not just to their leader Realised that they exist in an ecosystem, not linear world And then what did they do with this self-empowered, self-motivated, self-aware and profit hungry bunch of individuals? They fed them knowledge and they made them money……"

Peter-Anthony Glick Leveraging Organizational Knowledge