Knowledge Management, Attention, Human Capacity and Capital Building
A presentation by PrasenaLukas Ritzel, 24 October 02lritzel@prasena.com

..but even more so its a story about surfing dogs, cleaning teeths, politics from washington, about fireballs from nong khai and strong waitresses from bavaria during the 'octoberfest'!

Towards the Cybernetic Era: 9 change factors
The eMatrix is the symbol of the inter-dependency between an organization and its environment. It is the foundation of Prasena's principles and methodology.
Cyber-characteristic: coined by Prasena, this word qualifies a characteristic of the Cybernetic Revolution. Nine cyber-characteristics have been identified to-date: Globalization, Molecularization, Reintermediation, Digitalization, Virtualization, Internetworking, Immediacy, Innovation and Knowledge.

Knowledge
“Knowledge Workers possess the organization’s know-how and therefore have the capacity to innovate. Highly qualified or experienced, they can be assigned roles related to strategic watch, decision-making, professional training, etc. Internet, data analysis software, data mining software, are as many tools that have contributed to the emergence of this new worker’s profile and to a restructuring of work within organizations. According to current analyses, knowledge workers are expected to dominate the labor market in the third millennium”.
Great Dictionary of Terminology, 1999

Organizations must build and develop a human capital

- Knowledge-oriented Strategic Management: The top management translates its long-term objectives into competency needs, strives to develop a knowledgeable organization, and ensures that the organization's structure encourages and stimulates knowledge at all levels.
- Knowledge-oriented Financial Resources Management: Knowledge is considered and managed as a key corporate asset, generator of economic value, and it becomes a key component of the organization's social contribution to the greater community.
- Knowledge-oriented Technical Resources Management: Technologies are structured and used to stimulate the rethinking of traditional ways of working, to support more efficient processes and communication networks, and to help humans concentrate on strategic thinking, creation, design, analysis and decision-making, rather than routine tasks. Expert systems are able to take over sophisticated and complex operations.
- Knowledge-oriented Human Resources Management: Each employee is a knowledge worker, expert in his/her own right (therefore valuable individually and recognized as such) and contributor to what is becoming the greatest asset of an organization – its human capital.
- Knowledge-oriented Supply Chain Management: Knowledge is integrated in the design, the nature itself, the production processes, the promotion and the distribution of the organization's products and services. Most of these products and services have become "smart" and clients are able to know as much as they want about them.

A Knowledge Mess!
Everyday our varying roles necessitate that we, perhaps unsuccessfully, attempt to manage knowledge and information, as we are bombarded with relentless and overwhelming amounts of information, which we simultaneously have to protect ourselves from, yet search for, develop and disseminate.
The basic nature of an information and knowledge-based economy forces us to think about the way we conduct our work, the way we utilize information, share valuable insights and work on a real time basis to stay ahead in a game where our ability to make qualified decisions is critical as opportunities, advantages and profits are gained and lost in seconds
This requires that we develop human capacities and therefore human capitals of organizations

Example for information overflow and a dreadful solution: *Automated Response*

Dear Friend:

Thank you for taking the time to contact my office. Your views and
opinions are important to me.
Due to the high volume of Internet requests that I receive daily, I am
unable to provide you with an immediate response. However, if you
have included a current mailing address and phone number, you will
receive a response by phone or via the U.S. Postal Service. If you
did not include a mailing address and would like to receive a
response, please feel free to 'reply' to this email, attach a copy of
your original message, and be sure to include your postal address and
phone number.
I regret any inconvenience that this delay in corresponding may cause.
Again, thank you for contacting my office.

Sincerely,
John McCain, U.S. Senator, Website www.senate.gov/~mccain

One common denominator linking organisational behaviour, strategic management, corporate leaders and management gurus: KM will assist organisations in Human Capacity Building (HCB) and therefore improving their chances of surviving in the eBusiness context
We have to systematically visualize, implement and maintain a KM ‘way of work’ that will enable employees’ and the organization's capacity to grow and develop

The waitress from the bavarian 'octoberfest' stays as a symbol for a high capacity person, having to juggle up to 16 beer hugs, weighing each of them about 1 liter.

Effective Participation in KM: Does our organization provide…
The Means for employees to effectively participate in KM?
The Will for employees to effectively participate in KM?
The Skills for employees to effectively participate in KM?

Capacity to perform one’s work within new environment
Capacity to use new technologies
Capacity to manage attention

See Davenports ‘Deficit Principle’
Capacity to share one’s knowledge/ experience
Capacity to know oneself
Capacity to communicate

In his recent book, “The Attention Economy” Thomas Davenport navigates a clear path for us to follow in describing and analysing the nature of attention and its impact upon business, strategies and individuals. Perhaps the most pervasive point raised is that there exists an ‘attention deficit,’ in that attention is a scarce resource in the face of the information glut that we experience in our daily work (and personal) lives – there are more things that attract and attempt to consume our attention than we have attention to spare. Davenport (2001) terms this as the Deficit Principle – “Before you can manage attention, you need to understand just how depleted this resource is for organisations and individuals” which has psychological consequences (in the form of ‘info stress’) and wider implications for the way we work and for our organisations, namely:
An increased likelihood of missing key information when making decisions
Diminished time for reflection on anything but simple information transactions such as e-mail and voice mail
Difficulty holding others’ attention
Decreased ability to focus when necessary

The dog on the surfboard is a symbol for high capacit performance within a new environment. Not only does the dog manage the shaking surface of a surfboard, he even seems not to be disturbed by the water surrounding him

Much easier to develop strategies and allocate resources to provide means and skills, than to create, change, develop and maintain the mindset and motivation of employees and the organization as a whole
Corporate culture can be influenced – not systematically and forcefully changed
Business leaders must develop a KM mindset through the values, beliefs, norms and daily rituals of their organisation and its members
They then need to ensure that this mindset is supported by concrete measures that provide employees with the motivation to continually act as knowledge workers.

These dogs do sure active participate, wonder how the woman achieves to motivate all dogs in such a way to follow every movement [guess there are some dog cookies behind the back]

PART 3 = KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ASA SOURCE OF SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE – CONDITIONS AND CHALLENGES

Potential for Sustainable Competitive Advantage Uniqueness:
The resource must have a certain degree of uniqueness, in that no other firms have the ability to observe or understand it, and the subsequent ability to imitate it or obtain it through transfer.

The Fireballs [bang fai] from Nong Khai are a good 'tourist attarction' since they are unique and only visible at this special time of the year. If it how ever is a nature event or perhaps more a human-made spectacle will be shown in the future.

Potential for Sustainable Competitive AdvantageDurability:
The resource must be durable in that it can be used and applied over a length of time, and that it is pervasive enough to be used in different ways and in different situations.

Two symbols of durability, the millenium watch and Coca Cola, successful since many years all over the world, a perfect product it seems

Potential for Sustainable Competitive Advantage Value:
The resource must possess the potential to enable a firm to improve its efficiency and effectiveness, to exploit opportunities or neutralise threats, and to drive the development of the organisation forward.

BUT KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FULFILLS ALL THESE CONDITIONS ONLY IF…

KM as a source of competitive advantage
Involvement in KM has the potential to create competitive advantage for a firm, like any other activity or asset which is unique and hard to imitate
But if other firms find ways of copying and therefore reproducing successful KM activities, the competitive advantage will cease to exist.
Companies will find that their competitive advantage will be more realisable from ‘first mover advantages’ – that is, the list of organisations who have already moved on KM issues and become revolutionaries in their industries, and to a more limited extent, other corporations who develop a KM competency during the immediately ensuing years.
But even this competitive edge will cease to exist if corporations rest on their initial success
Samples for successful KM organizations: organizations that use their available knowledge to innovate ahead of others (Sony for example), or to have very high quality (zero-defect through Japanese-style QCM for example), or to exploit every market niche through well-exploited intimate knowledge of the market (companies that really do mass-customization for example)...

The idea is simple, although the application is difficult: it is that rather than keep KM as a special project, something that must be done especially because the Management wants it at a certain point of time, it should become a second nature for employees who should practice it routinely in their daily work.

This lady symbolizes very nice the message above. Even if she would brush her teeth very carefully for the next two days, it would certainly not help. Only if brushing teeth becomes a daily routine, something that automatically is done within ones day - then it will show results

To conclude, “It’s a day-to-day reality that we often don’t have the time or attention to commit to the processes and activities above – and it is also a strategic reality that to survive in eBusiness it is paramount that we innovate, re-conceptualise and visualize the business concepts and models of tomorrow by using the processes and activities above. Developing HCB Strategies that address this simple but critical paradox will be a huge challenge."

“We will need to find ways of building our capacity to work in an environment that demands quick, effective responses and decisions while simultaneously considering the future through the creation of shared context, experimentation, thinking and reasoning, and articulating tacit knowledge for application by others and in different contexts and situations”.

The name "QWERTY" for our typewriter keyboard comes from the first six letters in the top alphabet row (the one just below the numbers). It is also called the "Universal" keyboard for rather obvious reasons. It was the work of inventor C. L. Sholes, who put together the prototypes of the first commercial typewriter in a Milwaukee machine shop back in the 1860's.For years, popular writers have accused Sholes of deliberately arranging his keyboard to slow down fast typists who would otherwise jam up his sluggish machine. In fact, his motives were just the opposite.When Sholes built his first model in 1868, the keys were arranged alphabetically in two rows. At the time, Milwaukee was a backwoods town. The crude machine shop tools available there could hardly produce a finely-honed instrument that worked with precision. Yes, the first typewriter was sluggish. Yes, it did clash and jam when someone tried to type with it. But Sholes was able to figure out a way around the problem simply by rearranging the letters. Looking inside his early machine, we can see how he did it.The first typewriter had its letters on the end of rods called "typebars." The typebars hung in a circle. The roller which held the paper sat over this circle, and when a key was pressed, a typebar would swing up to hit the paper from underneath. If two typebars were near each other in the circle, they would tend to clash into each other when typed in succession. So, Sholes figured he had to take the most common letter pairs such as "TH" and make sure their typebars hung at safe distances. He did this using a study of letter-pair frequency prepared by educator Amos Densmore, brother of James Densmore, who was Sholes' chief financial backer. The QWERTY keyboard itself was determined by the existing mechanical linkages of the typebars inside the machine to the keys on the outside. Sholes' solution did not eliminate the problem completely, but it was greatly reduced. The keyboard arrangement was considered important enough to be included on Sholes' patent granted in 1878, some years after the machine was into production. QWERTY's effect, by reducing those annoying clashes, was to speed up typing rather than slow it down.Sholes and Densmore went to Remington, the arms manufacturer, to have their machines mass-produced. In 1874, the first Type-Writer appeared on the market. No contemporary account complains about the illogical keyboard. In fact, few contemporary accounts even mention the machine at all. At its debut, it was largely ignored.Sales of the typewriter did not take off until after Remington's second model was introduced in 1878, offering the only major modification to the keyboard as we know it today. The first machines typed only capital letters. The new offered both upper and lower case by adding the familiar shift key. It is called a shift because it actually caused the carriage to shift in position for printing either of two letters on each typebar. Modern electronic machines no longer shift mechanically when the shift key is pressed, but its name remains the same. In the decades following the original Remington, many alternative keyboards came and went. Then, in 1932, with funds from the Carnegie Foundation, Professor August Dvorak, of Washington State University, set out to develop the ultimate typewriter keyboard once and for all.Dvorak went beyond Blickensderfer in arranging his letters according to frequency. Dvorak's home row uses all five vowels and the five most common consonants: AOEUIDHTNS. With the vowels on one side and consonants on the other, a rough typing rhythm would be established as each hand would tend to alternate.
With the Dvorak keyboard, a typist can type about 400 of the English language's most common words without ever leaving the home row. The comparable figure on QWERTY is 100. The home row letters on Dvorak do a total of 70% of the work. On QWERTY they do only 32%.The Dvorak keyboard sounds very good. However, a keyboard need to do more than just "sound" good, and unfortunately, Dvorak has failed to prove itself superior to QWERTY. It appears that many of the studies used to test the effectiveness of Dvorak were flawed. Many were conducted by the good professor himself, creating a conflict of interest question, since he had a financial interest in the venture. A U.S. General Services Administration study of 1953 appears to have been more objective. It found that it really didn't matter what keyboard you used. Good typists type fast, bad typists don't.It's not surprising, then, that Dvorak has failed to take hold. No one wants to take the time and trouble to learn a new keyboard, especially if it isn't convincingly superior to the old. A few computer programs and special-order daisy wheels are available to transform modern typewriters or word processors to the Dvorak keyboard, but the demand for these products is small. After all, expert typists can can do nearly 100 words a minute with QWERTY . Word processors increase that speed significantly. The gains that Dvorak claims to offer aren't really needed.

Other examples: Japan dominates the world today with transistorized electronic consumer products to a degree that impacts the USA's balance of payments with Japan, even though transistors were invented and patented in the US, because Sony bought transitor licensing rights from Western Electric at a time when the American electronics consumer industry was churning out vacuum tube models and reluctant to compete with its own products.
British cities were still using gas street lighting into the 1920s long after US and German cities had converted to electric street lighting, because British municipal governments had invested heavily in gas lighting and placed regulatory obstacles in the way of the competing electric gas light companies.
China lost the control it had on the seas on the 15th Century because of a power struggle between 2 factions of the Chinese court. One section was the one in charge of the famous treasure fleets of China. When the other faction gained the upper hand in the struggle, its stopped sending fleets, dismantled all shipyards and forbade ocean-going shipping. Because the entire region was politically unified, the decision stopped ships over the entire China, and became irreversible because no shipyards remained to turn out ships that would prove the folly of that decision. Similar political struggles isolated China from all technologies in the 15th and 16th Century, causing it to lose all the advance it had accumulated for Centuries….