Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is the practice of creating a highly diverse work environment that revolves around the information possessed by people within the company. The knowledge contained within the minds of a company's employees is one of the most valuable assets that company has. It is very hard for another company to recreate a good knowledge management system because their employees are different and know different things.

At Nucor Steel they make egg cartons... no wait, that doesn't sound right. At Nucor Steel they make Chocolate Milk... hmmm, that can't be right either, but lets continue anyways. Nucor Steel has a highly adept team of moderately skilled workers that produce a product. This product is then sold for money or traded for drugs, depending on the market conditions at the time.

At Partners Healthcare, their knowledge management practices revolve around medical conditions, prescription drugs, and medically conditioned prescription drugs. When you have a doctor that is an idiot, people die. Maybe not at first. Maybe they get home and feel a sharp pain in their stomach where they just had surgery and it turns out the doctor left his scalpel in their abdomen. When this happens, hospitals and doctors get sued (oh yeah, and people die). So it is important to have a very good knowledge management system in place when it comes to healthcare, because without it not-so-good things will happen (and by this I mean bad things).

Buckman Labs is another beast of a company that uses knowledge management to "buck" the competition (don't worry if you don't understand this analogy, I'm not sure I do either). Anyways, in these labs they have, they carry out experiments and shit. In order to accurately perform these experiments, they need lots of knowledge about how long they can torture a lab rat before it begins to feel underappreciated and hires a lawyer.

In summary, knowledge management is a fairly important subject. People count on it. Even animals count on it. In order to have a successful competitive advantage over another company it is not enough to just have the most current technology. You need to have a team of highly trained, knowledgeable, and skilled workers to capitalize on the knowledge they possess in order to become an industry leader.