Enterprise Knowledge Acquisition: An Essential & Ignored Factor for Business Process Improvement
As technology and digital transformation continues to drive advancement in how businesses operate, knowledge acquisition has become an essential factor that organizations cannot ignore. The process of acquiring new knowledge is often referred to as Enterprise Knowledge Acquisition (EKA) and, in essence, involves the collection and sharing of digital, intangible assets. Knowledge may include data such as customer and employee profiles, or digital content such as photos, videos, and textual documents. Enterprise Knowledge Acquisition entails both active and passive collection as well as structured, unstructured, and semi structured sources.
Knowledge acquisition is important to the success of any organization and is a powerful tool to achieve sustained competitive advantage. Without it, companies can find themselves stuck in the same inefficient processes and the same outdated technology, unable to benefit from the latest advancements available. By tracking, understanding, and applying the knowledge acquired, firms can remain competitive and innovate when faced with changing industry demands.
This knowledge acquisition process can be broken down into three main stages:
1. Understanding the purpose of knowledge acquisition: What kind of knowledge is sought and what are the goals behind its acquisition?
2. Gathering the necessary data and content: Is the data collected complete, correct, and compliant?
3. Digitizing the obtained knowledge and organizing it: Is the acquired knowledge presented in an accessible, usable, and user-friendly format?
In order to successfully carry out the various stages of the knowledge acquisition process, organizations must employ the appropriate software and other technological tools. Automated tools like intelligent content extraction and natural language processing (NLP) are invaluable assets in understanding the content of digital resources, with the ability to identify key insights and pattern-recognition that help determine what knowledge is collected and how it is organized. Additionally, powerful data integration tools can provide a unified view of the insights, enabling analyst-level understanding of the collected data.
By utilizing these strategies and technology in acquiring knowledge for business improvement, firms can gain substantial benefits, including but not limited to increased productivity, improved customer relationships, enhanced decision-making capabilities, reduced operational costs, and higher rates of employee satisfaction. But there are challenges associated with Enterprise Knowledge Acquisition, such as data security and privacy compliance, the abundance of complex data sources, the difficulty of understanding how to utilize the collected data, and the need to maintain balance between the costs of setting up and running the process.
To successfully incorporate Enterprise Knowledge Acquisition into organizations, there must be an adequate budget as well as a clear implementation strategy. Managers will also need to invest in ongoing training and resources to ensure that employees understand how to apply the collected knowledge and use it to improve business processes. Due to the complexity of the process and the amount of resources required to properly establish the system, it is important to start small and create a “proof of concept” to show the success of EKA before investing a large budget.
In conclusion, as technology progresses, organizations can either choose to ignore the power of knowledge acquisition, or leverage it as a vital tool to gain competitive insights and recognize opportunities to innovate. Those who choose the latter can find themselves far ahead of the competition and achieve more cost-effective and successful business process improvement.
