Best Practices Business Models and Strategies

The next few years will witness dramatic changes in best practices, business models, and strategies for e-knowledge. While these cycles of reinvention will continue for years, enterprises should move out immediately on five actions to enhance their readiness for e-knowledge.

	1.
	Storytelling

Engage everyone in the enterprise on the subject of e-knowledge. Use storytelling to explore how individuals will experience knowledge. Mobilize energies from grassroots to the CEO and Board.

e-Knowledge is not the subject of a momentary conversation, a fad, the business school topic du jour. Your enterprise’s response to this topic may define your enterprise’s success in the next five years. The challenge for leadership is how to make e-knowledge a central topic in engaging conversations that mobilize energies and release creativity.

Talk the talk. The strategic conversations about knowledge can focus on a variety of themes:

• Using storytelling to engage broad cross-sections of your enterprise in addressing the e-knowledge future and sharing real-life success stories;
• Developing a range of future scenarios about the use of knowledge and the changing roles of organizations and individuals;
• Using these stories and scenarios to explore the possibilities of truly transformational, and likely disruptive, changes in the existing knowledge value chain and power relationships; and

• Exploring the ecology, roles, and interactions of different knowledge entities — individuals, teams and work groups, communities of practice, and knowledge networks of various kinds.

Strategic, enterprise-wide conversations about knowledge should balance visioning with stories of successful transformation already achieved.

Walk the talk. It’s not just about storytelling. Enterprises should begin to utilize technology-supported tools for sharing knowledge, such as those using the Semantic Web and intelligent agent capabilities.

Exemplary Resources:
Engage the Enterprise

• The Squirrel: The Seven Highest Value Forms of Organizational Storytelling, Stephen Denning.
  www.stevedenning.com/squirrel.htm
• Eastern Michigan University storytelling about technology-driven change. www.transformingeknowledge.info
• Collaborative Decisionmaking and Personal Knowledge Management with R-Objects Pepper.
  www.r-objects.com/papers/www2002/ jernst-www2002.pdf

	2.
	Knowledge Strategy

Develop a knowledge strategy for the enterprise that brings into alignment: 1) management of the enterprise’s knowledge assets, and 2) the enterprise’s business plans to achieve its mission and goals.

Develop a contemporary perspective on the strategic importance of knowledge, complementing the VOI perspective on the strategic importance of technology. In the past, a laissez-faire approach to knowledge was sufficient, but no longer.