Gagan Kaul Blog

One of the key differentiators for a company amongst its competitors has been the unique proprietary knowledge it possesses. But with the advent of the current Information Age, where information is freely available on the Internet, the word ‘proprietary’ is slowly losing its importance and meaning. This does not mean that the firms operating in specialized or niche verticals should shut shop. Availability of information is one thing and the ability to make sense out of it (knowledge) and use it to your advantage is the key paradigm that I want to talk about in this post.

A company armed with the right knowledge makes it more qualified in understanding a particular region and the operating dynamics can create strategies resulting in huge advantages over competitors who might lack the same familiarity. In the course of my work at Netscribes, I have come to appreciate the huge emphasis that companies place on the availability of ‘right information at the right time’. The advances in technology have opened up new possibilities in which information can be shared rapidly and efficiently. And along with it have come the various techniques, tools and methods to manage that information.

There are two ways in which a company can address its information needs. The first is by creating internal information repositories, which contain the “knowledge” aggregated through employee interactions internally and externally. Many organizations have started using tools and technologies like blogs, wikis, intranets or the more recent Microsoft Sharepoint in a conscious endeavor to make information sharing a habit. The basic premise being that a wealth of information about customers, competitors, products, research et al., can be collected and shared through daily transactions that an employee comes across. The second way is by creating special teams with the sole job of mining information available in the public domain. This is primarily seen as a competitive intelligence, opportunity scoping and market analytics activity.

Information management is not the crucial part. Creation and exchange of information are the more important activities in the knowledge space. It is interesting to note how such a methodology is perceived in the professional social environment, where people who do not know one another come together to work on a common goal of creation and exchange of information. What needs to be studied is how a company goes about creating internal knowledge markets when the product is something as intangible as valuable knowledge created from experience and individual thought process. Information is only the raw material – it is how that information is used to build the knowledge that forms the basis of strategic decision making.