Leveraging Your Organization’s Unique Knowledge

Organizational knowledge is a more explicit form of structural capital than culture but, like culture, can be hard to pin down.

This is all the knowledge that is captured and recorded in your company. This means that every product design, every process map, every training manual, every formula, every document, every email, every entry ever made in a knowledge management system is part of your organizational knowledge. It includes all the knowledge that is being captured from your human and relationship capital. And capturing it is an important first step to the process of leveraging it.

Another way to think about organizational knowledge is as your own knowledge products. Some of these products, such as white papers, may actually be created for external purposes. But the great majority of these knowledge products are created to support your internal operations for either value creation or support services. And it all melds together to form a package that is your company’s way of doing things.

We learned this lesson years ago, during the start-up phase of a project with a new client. As we spent time with staffers at all levels in this consulting and engineering company, we kept hearing a phrase over and over, “the way we do things.” We finally coined the term the “Intertech Way” as a catchall for this concept: the processes, the approach, the attitude, the know how and the systems that this company applied in everything they do. Over time, we helped the company make the Intertech Way more tangible and visible for staff as well as for clients. One of the offshoots was a giant process map that they put on the wall and used to explain their value-add to clients. After spending a couple hours talking through the process map, one prospect said, “I now understand that you know much more about this than we do and that will make you a good partner for us.”

So it pays to learn to catalog of all sorts of captured knowledge but also to see it as a system that makes you unique. Learn to see this as an internal resource and also a way of branding your organization.

Adapted from Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century Organization by Mary Adams and Michael Oleksak.