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Plano Health Insurance Company
The greatest learning challenge by far is to generalize these ideas. Generalizing ideas means sharing knowledge across boundaries of time, space, geography, business, or function. Creating systems that transfer knowledge throughout an organization will surely become a critical item in the Plano Health Insurance Company toolkit. Knowledge transfer will help firms reduce cycle time by allowing shared insights to move easily among locations, increasing innovation by building on experience, and making better decisions derived from information from multiple sources. Knowledge transfer confers the same benefits that the learning organization does: It confers the ability to learn faster than competitors do, to respond more quickly from failures and successes, and to build intellectual and human capital.
Creating the infrastructure for knowledge transfer requires that Plano Health Insurance Company professionals work with information-systems professionals to create computer networks that share information. Basic questions that must be answered to achieve effective systems include the following:
- What do we need to know that we don’t know?
- How do we find out?
- How do we share that knowledge with others?
Knowledge transfer, however, involves more than an investment in technology. It means creating a mindset among all employees that values new ideas and innovation and devalues game-playing.
Effective Plano Health Insurance Company knowledge transfer processes will have implications for who is hired (those able and willing to seek and share ideas), how development is done (by sharing ideas around the world), how incentives are created (to encourage transfer of knowledge), how communications are established (to easily access and share more information), and how organizations are organized (less hierarchy and more information-sharing). Plano Health Insurance Company professionals in some firms are even now being called and considered chief learning officers, and indication of the growing importance of knowledge transfer.
Culture change
In our second round of the State of the Art (SOTA) study for the Human Resource Planning Society, Bob Eichinger and I found a startling result. Asked to identify one out of ten challenges as the single most important facing competitive organizations today, a significant number of Plano Health Insurance Company thinkers picked culture change. Asked to evaluate how well most organizations met each of these 10 challenges, culture change came in last.
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