Information Age, Net-business, Information Economy. Are these buzz words or business reality? The impact of the seemingly endless possibilities of today's technology on business depends primarily on the individual aptitude for knowledge transfer. No longer is the worry whether employees are playing Solitaire on the desktops, but if they are using the Internet for more than vacation planning and chat rooms. Future managers must be able to effectively utilize the wealth of information available to them.

Profits long considered to be a function of labor and capital, can now be derived from the knowledge base of companies. A knowledge-based organization has a competitive advantage that is far-reaching and not easily conquered. The success of organizations will lie with the managementâs ability to promote the sharing of knowledge, collect useful data, and interpret meaningful results.

Gary McWilliams and Marcia Stepanek in their article "Taming the Info Monster" written for Business Week Online, June 22, 1998, quote Jack Welch, the chairman of General Electric Company, as saying "An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive business advantage."

The challenge is to promote a culture change in companies. Managing change has long been identified as a business roadblock. Now management is faced with the task of encouraging behavior that is conducive to knowledge sharing, a most unnatural act in most corporate environments.

Let us again address the "why" before looking at the "how." In the before mentioned article, reference is made to successful knowledge management at Texas Instruments and Candence Design Systems which will save $2 billion and $7.6 million, respectively. The quantitative result of the use of information in real dollars is an impressive number. At TI challenging employees to share information by tying performance bonuses to ãout-of-the-boxä thinking resulted in manufacturing improvements that defeated the need to build new plants. The net, please read carefully, two billion dollars in realized savings! Candence Design Systems, Inc., a San Jose-based supplier of automated design software, used their in-house Web site to establish a sales training program that had sales representatives in the field two to four months faster. The information infrastructure is rapidly moving from "dirt road" status to a true Superhighway of Information Exchange. Referring again to Jack Welch, who says it best:  "Doing nothing, though wonât be an option. Stragglers won't just get overwhelmed. In the Net knowledge game, they will get overpowered by rivals who can more quickly turn what they know into profit."

Organizations must determine if lack of knowledge is based on lack of available resources, lack of ability, or simply lack of initiative. Managers must then build, enable and invoke the sharing of knowledge.