The Business of Knowledge
By Cheryl Currid
CIOs who consider the Web only as a tool for outbound e-commerce are missing the point. They fail to see that the Web holds another jewel—it can make people and their organizations smarter.
Sure, everybody knows that the Internet is full of relevant data for every occupation. But even today, it remains a vast and poorly documented pool of resources. It takes a person with good critical thinking skills to sort through the muck, glean good information, and then make good decisions. Those people are few and far between.
Somebody—perhaps the CIO, perhaps a business-aware Net technologist—needs to jump-start corporate smarts. Using the techniques of coaches and motivators, somebody needs to make it cool to be info-literate.
While I don't expect the corporate IT department to handle the whole job, IT staffers can sure help push the concept and execution.
Business executives are getting the point. Consider Ralph Larsen, chairman of Johnson & Johnson, who says, "We are not in the product business, we are in the knowledge business." The IT infrastructure at J&J has transformed into a network of knowledge-sharing systems under his watch.
Similarly, John Browne, CEO of British Petroleum, demonstrates his belief that knowledge is key to corporate survival and progress. Browne believed that it's not just a matter of doing business better, but doing new things.
"In order to generate extraordinary value for shareholders," Browne says, "a company has to learn better than its competitors and apply that knowledge throughout its business faster and more widely than they do."
