The article I chose was written in 2007 and talks about five U.S. companies that were able to get knowledge management right. The article starts off by saying that in 2007 U.S. companies had spent $73 billion on knowledge management software. This number is said to only increase further as the years go on. Being able to successfully implement these knowledge management systems is often a big challenge for companies. The five companies who did it best in 2007 were; World Bank, Southern Company, Down Jones, Shuffle Master and Pratt &Whitney.
World Bank completely transformed their information technology system going from a hierarchical source of low-interest loans to a decentralized organization that relied on knowledge management technologies in order to help fight poverty and disease in developing nations.
Southern Company prepared for Hurricane Katrina before the storm struck. They prepared for worst case scenarios and built enterprise content management platforms to endure engineers could get immediate access if they had to design plans of electrical substations and other power equipment. As a result of this early planning and knowledge management power was restored to victims of the hurricane homes in 12 days which was two weeks earlier than was expected.
Dow Jones realized that more people were going to the internet instead of newspapers for their information on the market. These movements prompted the company to gear up and use this knowledge to manage the content that was needed by their investors online.
Shuffler Master is a company that manufactures card shuffling machines and chip counting products. The company had issues with sales and order processing infrastructures that were fragmented making actual sales numbers outdated when looking at meeting a certain quota. The solution that they came up with was to build a portal that can pull data on demand form more than 60 databases. This action allowed real time information to be shared.
Pratt& Whitney manufacture airline engines and have to constantly transmit information about the status of their parts. They use a web portal to integrate all of their data and track all parts so they know where everything is at what time. They also know who needs what exactly when they order it taking the guessing work out of the ordering and delivering.
These companies were able to put the data and information they had gathered in their certain sector to good use. Chapter 11 talks a lot about being able to use the data you have and organize it in such a way that it will be useful. There is no point in collecting data if it is not going to be analyzed and turned into valuable knowledge that will be able to help a company further succeed and reach its goals.
Works Cited
McCormick, John. (October 4, 2007). Knowledge Management: 5 Big Companies That
Got It Right. Retrieved May 29, 2009, from http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/IT-Management/Knowledge-Management-5-Big-Companies-That-Got-It-Right/
World Bank completely transformed their information technology system going from a hierarchical source of low-interest loans to a decentralized organization that relied on knowledge management technologies in order to help fight poverty and disease in developing nations.
Southern Company prepared for Hurricane Katrina before the storm struck. They prepared for worst case scenarios and built enterprise content management platforms to endure engineers could get immediate access if they had to design plans of electrical substations and other power equipment. As a result of this early planning and knowledge management power was restored to victims of the hurricane homes in 12 days which was two weeks earlier than was expected.
Dow Jones realized that more people were going to the internet instead of newspapers for their information on the market. These movements prompted the company to gear up and use this knowledge to manage the content that was needed by their investors online.
Shuffler Master is a company that manufactures card shuffling machines and chip counting products. The company had issues with sales and order processing infrastructures that were fragmented making actual sales numbers outdated when looking at meeting a certain quota. The solution that they came up with was to build a portal that can pull data on demand form more than 60 databases. This action allowed real time information to be shared.
Pratt& Whitney manufacture airline engines and have to constantly transmit information about the status of their parts. They use a web portal to integrate all of their data and track all parts so they know where everything is at what time. They also know who needs what exactly when they order it taking the guessing work out of the ordering and delivering.
These companies were able to put the data and information they had gathered in their certain sector to good use. Chapter 11 talks a lot about being able to use the data you have and organize it in such a way that it will be useful. There is no point in collecting data if it is not going to be analyzed and turned into valuable knowledge that will be able to help a company further succeed and reach its goals.
Works Cited
McCormick, John. (October 4, 2007). Knowledge Management: 5 Big Companies That
Got It Right. Retrieved May 29, 2009, from http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/IT-Management/Knowledge-Management-5-Big-Companies-That-Got-It-Right/
I agree. Large budget dollars, time and resources on spent on get BI. There needs to be an upfront strategy first. Countless times I have seen data go untouched.
ReplyDeleteYeah, data definitely needs to be organized to be useful. I think many scientists are inherently disorganized and do not adequately store their data (unless their forced to!)so that other scientists can build off of their work. It is so frustrating to have a need for a piece of experimental data and not be able to find it; time to repeat the experiment:(
ReplyDeleteBravo to those five companies. In pretty much every job that I’ve worked for, data is constantly being reorganized and not a single one of these companies successful at creating a top notch data management system. What I've notice is that IT changes often involve a lot of office politics and layers of approval, it must be a top down versus a bottom up process. This is problematic because people at the top of the food chain often have no idea about what needed to be done to improve their operations and they will not listen to their subordinates.
ReplyDelete