A Knowledge Strategy for a Communications and PR practice of a large firm

Scientific Essay from the year 1999 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, The Open University (Open University Business School), course: Managing Knowledge, language: English, abstract: This report discusses a knowledge strategy in the communications profession in IBM Europe, Middle East and Africa. The focus of that report is to reveal the reshift from a replication- orientated organisation which excels in functionality onto a communicationsintensive consultant organsiation in which the active management of both tacit and explict knowledge does play an active role.

In the previous Intellectual Capital assessment, it has been discovered, that intellectual capital in this communications organization is rather unorganized and disperse. Here, it is

further looked into and found out that one of the reasons for this dispersed intellectual capital the missing accumulation and conversion of knowledge in that organization. Reasons for this are: few or very unuseful joint tools for personal use, no expert

professions to grow into and thus no personal reward to accumulate real market or media knowledge, and last but not least a culture that does reward the quick shot and not sustainability.

The underlying technology - is not used suffieciently and only in a dispersed way. As a consequence, lots of intellectual capital is lost constantly. Customer satisfaction - thus expressed through IBM employee attrition rate internally and through favourability level of journalists and number of strategically focused media imprints - could be increased significantly.

To gain a strategic advantage through a knowledgeable communications organization that brings value add to the business, it is recommended in this report to

* Setup a knowledge officer in the organisation, closely aligned to the VP of Communications.

* Setup communications knowledge hubs at strategic sites who act as key knowledge accumulators de-alllocation of professionals from non-strategic knowledge hubs

* A pervasive and user-friendly Lotus Notes / Web Notes / Domino database infrastructure to enable group work, together with the production deployment of sametime communications tools

like VPBuddy. Here, the focus is not so much about technology but about content, pervasiveness and persistence in its useage and reward. In a next step, explicit expert professions within the communications career path should be fostered to gain and reward expert and tacit knowledge and thus attract and retain the world-class communications professionals, a company like IBM needs to have.

This knowledge initiative should be aligned with IBM¿s strategic priorities, especially Priority 1, Priority 5 and Priority 6