An Approach Towards Leveraged Competitiveness Through Congenial Management Culture and Organizational Structure

Abstract

The effectiveness of Knowledge Management (KM) in improving a firm's ability toward leveraging its knowledge resources to achieve business objectives has much more to do with technological sophistication in Information Technology (IT). Today, organizations are exposed to greater discontinuous environmental change than ever before. The intensity of this change is bound to rise in the future, imposing organizations to leverage their knowledge resources for faster innovation. Taking these issues under consideration we define a conceptual model of KM, with the appreciation that KM is about reducing the constraints of existing operational management structures to improve innovation, responsiveness, competency and productivity. We call the model knowledge setup (KS). We treated KS as a Think Tank, which will take shorter time to organize intra setup cohesive forces and perform to provide innovative solutions to business problems of the organization. The main function of KS is to enable effective management of existing knowledge and create new knowledge. These two functions can be rephrased into five goals, which are (a) capture organizational memory (b) enhance collaboration; (c) improve productivity; (d) enable and drive innovation; and (e) cope with information overload, in an increasing turbulent and volatile environment within which the organization and the industry operates. KS is formed with the cohesion of three components, knowledge capital, social capital, and infrastructure capital, tied closely with each other by a fourth component, which is the management structure and the organizational culture. The success of KS is a function of management support and the congeniality of the organizational culture. Centralized control and bureaucracy impedes diffusion of innovation and creative thinking which are critical to the success of KS. At a given level of complexity, knowledge setup will vary in their time of response, which we can define as Knowledge Inertia of that setup. Accepting knowledge inertia as a factor affecting the performance of a knowledge setup, we propose here two notional parameters that can portray corporate performance in the application of knowledge capital to track moving organizational targets and goals. Transient responsiveness, which is the average time taken by knowledge setup to initiate the first response to a sudden change in the business environment from the moment the change in the environment, had created an appreciable impact on the organization's business process. And, the Steady state responsiveness, which corresponds to the ability of the knowledge setup to successfully solve similar business problem for repetitive occurrences.