United States Heathcare and how Knowledge Management can help

According to the article from "Business Week", money is being wasted in our health care system.  One issue highlighted is the mode of providing health care.  Hospitals work on a fee for service basis.  This leads to question the efficiency of providing quality over quantity of health care.  The country is experiencing high costs from this sector due to these inefficiencies, much of which is attributable to the redundancies in treatment and errors in malpractice.  Many people, organizations, and employers are taking matters into their own hands, by providing private care, forming events, giving incentives through wellness programs, but what can be used to innovate the system?  What can make it more efficient?  What can help is to provide quality health care instead of quantity.  Knowledge management systems can be used to improve the inefficiencies and eliminate the waste by providing better services that will lead to less visits.  Doctors should be able to provide such a quality of their service that no repeat visits are required.  To do that, they would need an on-demand knowledge based system.  When performing special services to patients, whether it is while performing surgery, recommending a prescription, offering information for options in moving forward with a procedure, or even consulting with other colleagues, a system of such would lead to better quality over quantity in providing health care to America.

knowledge appropriation, importance to competitive advantage and complimentary assets

     According to an article at http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/1317/ , appropriation has two possible meanings: "the act of making usable" or the fact of “making something belong, become our property"  The term knowledge appropriability is used commonly amongst doctors and practicioners.  When using the term in the context of an individual amongst it's community, it means it is a way of gauging the validity or usefulness of knowledge through out a common practice.  A summary found on www.sciencedirect.com in searching "codification", explains how today's organizations have a high demand for intense problem-solving attributes in employees.  This demand is taking the place of more traditional, implied or tacit knowledge employees.  Through means of codification or standardization, tacit knowledge is still important, but today's technology is gradually replacing work that was once performed by humans.  I believe this more evolved, knowledge-equipped workforce has something to do with the appropriation of knowledge and competitive advantage of organizations.  The more intelligent employee is becoming a valued asset, because big systems and machines require intelligent people to develop, manage and operate.
     Knowledge appropriation is important to competitive advantage because there is gain to an organization if the creativity of a human resource is producing knowledge that is superior to competition.  An example could be how one individual develops a software that runs a robotic arm in manufacturing that assembles parts and in turn, it increases productivity, reduces costs of converting output and allows them to supply more people than other firms.
     According to wikipedia, other firms can compete through means of complimentary assets, such as; brand recognition, or marketing power.  A firms' dominance in the market or loyalty from consumers can allow it to remain competitive.  A good example on wikipedia is of the company RC COLA.  They developed the first diet drink.  Though they were first to the market, soon competitors like Pepsi, because of customer loyalty, were able to copy the drink and begin driving business to their product.

Video on Composing a Career and Life

In this video, Linda Mason, an entrepreneur operating during a recession, speaks of her life story, her decision to change her life and her dedication to giving her life meaning.  She speaks of the adversity and struggles throughout the various transitions in her career; including her work with her husband in Sudan refugee camps and all the way to the creation of a humanitarian-based organization called, Bright Horizons, which manages employer sponsored child care programs across the world.  Before the creation of Bright Horizons, she would find herself feeling depressed.  She had everything; cars, money, a house that was paid off, but had nothing that stood out as a difference maker.  She began reflecting on her life and it caused her to start leading a life that impacts others and not just herself.  The message of this video is about rethinking your life and career.  The story inspires to not take your life for granted and to take chances even if the future does not seem clear.  This message is a wake-up call for people who just settle for selfish minimum.  It asks for listeners to take hold of their own life and start managing it so that it affects others now and the ones that come later after you are gone.   Linda Mason's life story inspires me to take my life more serious and to follow my passion to make an impact on others, so that there will be a positive world even after I am gone.

Knowledge as a Strategic Asset in Companies

A company faces competition, regardless of the area of expertise from which they operate.  What can set one company apart from another is how the company develops strategy from what is known or obtained.  Strategic assets are competencies that a company possesses.  Physically, the asset could be a design, patent, copyright, an internal process, or knowledge about a specialized area.  What makes an asset strategic is how a company uses core competencies to position themselves toward reaching its' goals.  Knowledge is the most important strategic asset to companies because it gives an advantage on competition.  Knowledge is the information about the facts; the numbers in the statistics, the results from testing, or all other resources that indicate the position of a company.  A company must use all of these resources of information to construct a plan that allows them to remain competitive and to get out in front of the other companies.  Because of this better access of information, the company will have a hard to replicate lead on others and have more business amongst competitors.

Increasing Return

The concept of increasing return shows up in business efficiency, when a company adds new technologies to a process to increase output.  Usually attached is the opposite of increasing return, diminishing return.  With diminishing return, there is an associated critical point in the process of addition, where output has exceeded capacity.  The more inputs that are added does not yield more output, it actually reduces output.  The idea of increasing return can be applied to the labor market and the high demand for specialized employees.  Individually, the more and more knowledge that a person gains, the easier it gets for them to learn new things.  This is a great motivation for people, because there is not a capacity for discipline.  It is up to the individual to take action and decide to learn.  There is only a capacity for recollection.  Discipline leads to experience and experience leads functional decisions.  If one has the curiosity and desire for learning, the more valuable they are to an employer and the more likely they will be employed.  

Difficulties and Lessons Learned

The difficulty of implementing a Knowledge Management System within a company is not operating the system, it is getting users to contribute or provide information to the system.  On a personal level, people may not want to share their knowledge publicly because they feel their position within the organization will be compromised, they might be insecure, or they just are not used to the change.  It depends on the top managements initiative for implementing the change to the organizational culture.  A company can change the culture by informing the employees through weekly newsletters, email blasts or meetings, explaining how using the knowledge management system is a benefit for them and the entire organization.  Or individual business units can show the difference between how the employees used to work, compared to how they work now, using the knowledge management system.  The most important fact of change is to stay positive.  The more positive an organization remains at changing the culture, the more beneficial the system will actually be.

Solution and Benefits

For most companies that face difficulties in providing support for their products, a Knowledge Management System can be implemented.  Also known as KMS, these systems are used as a tool for providing a quick answer for the customer that needs support or for the technician working on-site.   These systems have web-based interfaces and allow users to create files that document the solution to the various problems that occur within the span of a products life, to access databases that contain information that is related to the problems and queries of a product and to receive credit for the solutions that are posted.  This is beneficial to a company because it cuts down on the amount of hours spent per incident, it allows for more organization within the company's culture, and most importantly, if the company loses a valuable employee, due to extenuating circumstances, the knowledge that worker had is available for further use.

Problem

Businesses take risk in making products.  Consumers take risk in buying products.  People invest money into product solutions for a purpose, so that when they buy a particular product, it will not only do what they need it to do, but there are benefits attached to the purchase.  Products, however overtime become defective.  Businesses face many obstacles, not with just creating the solution, but also providing support for the solution.  On top of that, they have to keep the day to day operations at a sustainable level.  In the scenario of providing support for a solution,  a valuable worker to the company may have to leave their job for personal reasons or maybe the business may not be able to afford the person.  Whichever scenario, the company has to consider the amount of hours that are being spent on the support calls.  If that worker leaves, the knowledge that worker had before or obtained while working there should be shared.   The problem is how does a company that faces these forces still continue to grow and be efficient in providing support for their customers?