Knowledge is Profit

The belief that "knowledge is power" tells only half the story. Converting knowledge into useful products, processes, and services is becoming increasingly critical to any business' success. There is an accelerating recognition among corporations that their future profitability depends upon intangible assets such as creativity, flexibility, and the speed with which they can share and transfer new ideas and information.

Knowledge acquisition, validation, and assessment are critical processes for today's technical managers and engineers, who are often operating in a highly collaborative, geographically distributed environment. That is why Wyle Information Systems stepped up to the knowledge management plate early. "With so many on-site locations and an ever-growing employee population, we can only benefit from the structured processes and approaches as well as the technologies of knowledge management," said Rodney P. Hunt, former President and CEO. "We already implemented a corporate knowledge base to support rapid proposal prototyping. In addition, we have inaugurated Centers for Technical Excellence and a Virtual Center of Excellence program to foster collaboration and share knowledge at the grassroots level."

"Many of our clients are asking us how we are going to implement our knowledge management practices into their organization as well," he said.

KM is the enterprise-wide, ongoing application of intellectual capital to achieve organizational mission and goals. It provides organizations with the ability to anticipate and adapt to unpredictable change quickly and appropriately. As measured in direct benefits to your company, KM:

• Improves enterprise-wide decision quality and agility through just-in-time intelligence
• Enhances mission performance
• Facilitates informed business actions such as Bid/No-Bid decisions
• Fosters rapid prototyping of proposals and technical solutions for clients
• Encourages improved client support
• Supports organizational risk mitigation initiatives

Most any business can benefit by improving key processes within an organization that help people create, use, and share information more effectively. Ultimately, effective knowledge management will have profound implications for the roles of individual workers. It engages people throughout an organization to focus their intellectual abilities on innovation and best-of-breed solutions.

Our managers and engineers benefit from applying structured methodologies to capture and formalize domain-specific best practices and lessons learned. Organizational adaptability to change as it relates to resource allocation, business development, quick-response capacity to market fluctuations, and technical refreshment is a significant consideration in contemporary businesses—both large and small.

Wyle Information Systems is already using knowledge management methodologies and processes to develop rapid turnaround first drafts of proposals and presentations within the Business Development group. These processes include ongoing review of monthly project progress reports, and placing that information into our Web-enabled, text-searchable knowledge base. The benefit of developing a robust first draft early in the proposal lifecycle is that the final product submitted to our clients is enhanced by being subject to multiple technical and programmatic reviews. And a better proposal product results in higher win rates, which in turn means increased revenue.

Many companies and organizations around the world, such as Hewlett-Packard, Booz Allen Hamilton, the U.S. Navy, and Dow Chemical, have invested in knowledge management. Importantly, the Federal Government's first chief knowledge officer—Dr. Sheeren Remez of the General Services Administration—was appointed in mid-1999. These organizations have viewed their employees as an investment. These investments have turned into assets, and the organizations have prospered. We already made the leap that will carry us well into this new century. We now have formalized methods for collecting and sharing pertinent knowledge company-wide.

We invite our staff to submit ideas, best practices, innovative technical/programmatic methods, and any other ideas on knowledge management. Please direct ideas or questions to kevin.tucker@wyle.com.

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