Leveraging Relationships. The most successful business models in the e-Knowledge Economies will be based on leveraging and extending existing relationships. Whether it involves creating or sharing knowledge or learning, relationships with learners, members, customers, staff, suppliers, and other stakeholders are at the center of the picture.

What does this suggest for future prospects of knowledge and learning enterprises? The future belongs to knowledge and learning enterprises whose relationship is grounded on highly motivated stakeholders who are co-creators of the learning/knowledge sharing processes. Consider these examples:

• The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) has defined the “body of knowledge” for HIM professionals, which is accessible from the AHIMA portal. Learning and knowledge seeking/creating experiences are also available through the portal. The association has reinvented its governance structure along a community of practice model, creating self-defining, emergent communities.
• Claus Unger of Fern Universitaet in Germany (an open university) has described the "learning spaces" his institution hopes to create. Students could use them repeatedly throughout their careers, pursuing different paths, pursuing learning at different depths, making use of sharable materials from across the Web that would be reconfigured in real time for different purposes.

The future epicenter of e-knowledge sharing/e-learning appears to be: proprietary learning and knowledge providers, associations and professional societies, corporations with strong enterprise learning and communities of practice, open universities focusing on lifelong learning relationships, and traditional universities using relationships through alumni, extension and continuous learning channels.

To paraphrase, the epicenter of knowledge may be with the individual but the epicenter of leverage is with the organization.

Rudy Ruggles and Dan Holthouse

To paraphrase, the epicenter of knowledge may be with the individual but the epicenter of leverage is with the organization.

Rudy Ruggles and Dan Holthouse

Reinventing Strategies

To assure success in the e-knowledge future, enterprises must redirect their strategies — not just for knowledge, but for all business processes, products, services, and experiences that depend on knowledge. Some of that redirection can start immediately, while other refinements must await new technologies, standards, marketplaces, changes in infrastructures, and reinventions of best practices and business models. The point is that the emergence of e-knowledge should affect every aspect of enterprise strategy and business planning.

Take Immediate Actions to Improve Your Readiness for e-Knowledge. In Chapter 7, we recommend 10 actions that your enterprise can undertake immediately to enhance its readiness for e-knowledge.

Craft an Enterprise Knowledge Strategy. Reinvention of enterprise strategy can start immediately through the crafting of an explicit knowledge strategy. At its first level, this strategy identifies the centrality of knowledge to the enterprise’s mission, vision, and competitive position. At present time, enterprises bury their knowledge strategy implicitly within strategic and business plans. The enterprise must explicitly state its knowledge strategies and link those strategies explicitly to unit business plans. Chapter 7 illustrates how to create a knowledge strategy that drives enterprise initiatives.