The Knowledge Source

In today’s fast-paced global economy, companies must embrace a new way of leveraging quality for it to stay globally competitive. Major challenges must be addressed such as increased speed, aggressiveness and quantity of global competition; rapid business cycles and fluctuations in national and international markets; customer demand of an increasingly higher standard of quality value; accelerated changes in processes for manufacturing, product development and customer service to meet these customer demands; and state of the art technology in a range of business activities – from global distribution and supply to computer-based (e-commerce) purchasing of products and services.

More and more companies are now making the quality as their language in conducting business. Quality leadership is now greatly expected by customers and they are now demanding as ever. Different technologies are now readily available to facilitate and streamline the conduct of business. Quality dictates a company to align all aspects of its operations – design, manufacture, distribution and service of products and services – in very specific customer value terms. Company processes must be focused, established, led and maintained to achieve customer-value based success.

Quality today has become a foundation for constant management innovation and leadership, which is integral in explaining the international growth of quality. For these companies to meet the demands of the international business environment and maintain their quality competitiveness, they must use their strength and leadership in five quality process areas: (1) more powerful practices to develop and launch new products by providing consistent customer value throughout the company’s global markets; (2) more effective management of suppliers and purchasing activities that address internationalization and outsourcing – which would not only limit to the suppliers but also in strategic partnership with competitors for them to be able to have a buying power and exchanges of expertise areas; (3) more consistent motivation of human resources to support quality initiatives and recognition of the importance of technology and how it emphasizes the roles and responsibilities everyone plays throughout the company; (4) a renewed emphasis on the economics of quality; and (5) development of new strategic and operational leadership of quality itself.

These emphasize on a higher and higher standard of quality value in products and services by these organizations – and the quality know-how on which this standard is based – is integral to economic, social and technological growth of today’s global economy.

Quality practices of most companies are still traditional (at least in the area that I’m currently located, Philippines) in a compelling way that most of the departments are still in a functional silos. More and more companies are now beginning to adopt the new concepts of Quality Management from Quality Management Systems into varying business management concepts or systems where it addresses and incorporates the whole business into a complex and dynamic construct of linked and integrated processes, including those that generate value through the realization and provision of products and services, those that provide support and those that provide strategic direction, planning and control.
These processes must be understood fully to be able to be more effective having in mind a “systems thinking” or approach or what we call a holistic point of view where everybody is functioning and knows the what, why, and how of their functions and how it will affect the other functions (or departments) not only in point of view of quality but looking at the total operation of the business as a whole.
Essential to all this is the management of knowledge and deliverables, not the supervision of activities. The business management system approach focuses on the use of knowledge management to understand and manage “dynamic complexity” where the knowledge in this context includes technology (physical and intellectual) and systems applied to achieve strategic objectives, including customer satisfaction, competitive advantage and, ultimately financial returns.

The role of quality management in the business management system context is directly engaged in all other business functions and processes including strategic planning, marketing and sales, project management, design and process engineering, procurement, staffing and data processing, with the quality function serving a facilitative role. There is a considerable need for the quality function to evolve its support processes on an enterprise scale since the scope of the business management system extends very well. Therefore we must address these needs and opportunities by considering each major component of a business management system such as the operating system which is the brain and nervous system where we should align the strategic performance objectives with the requirements of customers and stakeholders; an integrated management system where the essential knowledge and core competencies reside in its value generating processes and must be strategically and continuously develop; and the quality’s new role which facilitate the development, implementation, assessment and continual improvement of the system. This approach is essential if the business is to effectively align its support, management and system processes with its value generating processes. The role of quality could involve enterprise-wide training, facilitation of process definition, documentation, monitoring and control, etc. It could also guide the application of quantitative tools, analysis and continual improvement methods throughout all the business activities – from analyzing customer requirements and monitoring performance, process and product data to setting objectives and enhancing product and process development methodologies.

Most (if not all) Philippine local companies in general just merely adopt and conducting audits just for the sake of complying to the standards (or determining compliance vs. non-compliance) and not really for making the current operation more competitive and value generating (though some are actually getting benefits by improving the “bottlenecks” but painstakingly slow). Audits are supposed to pinpoint where are we now vs. the desired result/s right? Finding the value-adding activities and eliminate non-value adding activities to make the business process more efficient and effective, thus saving considerable if not enormous amount of savings for the company (here lies the financial returns we are talking about).

The big Q: Is there a hope for Quality in the 21st Century? (as was asked by a dear colleague, jphatala, though I might write a separate blog about this one, but in the meantime, my two cents.)

The small or big A (as you, readers view it): Yes. In fact, a big YES! Reasons? There are infinite. There will always be a better way, a new way, a million ways to improve (continuous improvement). Our nature, as human, we always seek for perfection, and we view the world imperfect, that passion alone is the driving fuel that makes us raving to “perfection” not just for Quality alone but more of a general context (this relates to the “learning curve” which I would also try to blog soon). It is just now a question of how fast we reach there before anyone does. Speed (or should I say velocity – which includes the right direction) vs. Quality and coping up to the exponentially changing world is now, more than ever, a global issue in most organizations.

In the Philippine scenario/context (which I hate to say it), it will follow. Slowly. Factors? There are again infinite. Cultures, beliefs, political issues, corruption, etc.

Next sequel: The International Growth of Quality in the Global Economy context.

At first, I thought that “Data” , “Information”, “Knowledge” were only simple terminologies that convey the same meaning. Upon studying and understanding it, there’s a variation that I will try to explain. I realized, data are bits and pieces of just about anything I encountered everyday through various media of sorts e.g., conversations, newspapers, ads, world wide web, etc. Information on the other hand is the one that gives a distinct role based on these data (for example, if I give you 3 different colors, say, red, green, and blue; would you know which one is my favorite?). More or less no. But if I say blue, then this data (the color) will now become an information for you. Furthermore, I later realized (now that I’m studying Knowledge Management or KM) that understanding data and information play a vital or key role in a much greater concept of KM. Here’s what I thought:

First, data will only have a meaningful use if we’re able to get vital or key information out of it in such a way that it can generate useful applications that we needed.

Second, these informations will only be more useful when you are able to understand, rationalize, communicate, relate, apply, and share it to others. That way, others will have a common understanding or rationalization as you and most probably, can also generate more information that can grow exponentially. In a much shorter explanation, these informations can be proven useful if synthesized by more than one head to make it more holistic.

Third, these informations where acquisition involves complex cognitive processes: perception, learning, communication, association and reasoning eventually transformed into knowledge that can rationalize into a much more diverse and greater concepts or applications.

*Note: Knowledge synthesis can form a higher form as seen in the graph: intelligence and wisdom generation, which I will not include anymore (these will soon provided with a much greater explanation).

When these knowledge generated exponentially, it now requires management, making the most out of these knowledge generated, thus, KM.

In a nutshell, Knowledge Management (from synthesized data and information) focuses on a higher plane of getting the desired objectives i.e., performance improvement, competitive advantage, innovation, sharing of best practices, continuous improvement, etc. In this era of what we call “Information Age”, what typically differs is the generation of “intellectual worker” vs. “manual worker”. Intellectual capital is another focus of many organization that gives competitive advantage in this fast, rapidly changing world.

Much more of KM to follow…