A quality management system (QMS) is a collection of business processes focused on consistently meeting customer requirements and enhancing their satisfaction. It is aligned with an organization's purpose and strategic direction. It is expressed as the organizational goals and aspirations, policies, processes, documented information, and resources needed to implement and maintain it. Early quality management systems emphasized predictable outcomes of an industrial product production line, using simple statistics and random sampling. By the 20th century, labor inputs were typically the most costly inputs in most industrialized societies, so focus shifted to team cooperation and dynamics, especially the early signaling of problems via a continual improvement cycle. In the 21st century, QMS has tended to converge with sustainability and transparency initiatives, as both investor and customer satisfaction and perceived quality are increasingly tied to these factors. Of QMS regimes, the ISO 9000 family of standards is probably the most widely implemented worldwide – the ISO 19011 audit regime applies to both and deals with quality and sustainability and their integration.
The knowledge economy, or knowledge-based economy, is an economic system in which the production of goods and services is based principally on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to advancement in technical and scientific innovation. The key element of value is the greater dependence on human capital and intellectual property as the source of innovative ideas, information and practices. Organisations are required to capitalise on this "knowledge" in their production to stimulate and deepen the business development process. There is less reliance on physical input and natural resources. A knowledge-based economy relies on the crucial role of intangible assets within the organisations' settings in facilitating modern economic growth.
Knowledge workers are workers whose main capital is knowledge. Examples include ICT professionals, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, editors, and academics, whose job is to "think for a living".
There is no agreed definition of value networks. A general definition that subsumes the other definitions is that a value network is a network of roles linked by interactions in which economic entities engage in both tangible and intangible exchanges to achieve economic or social good. This is close to the definition of Verna Allee, see below. Here are a few definitions that provide different perspectives on the general concept of a value network.
Organizational storytelling is a concept in management and organization studies. It recognises the special place of narration in human communication, making narration "the foundation of discursive thought and the possibility of acting in common." This follows the narrative paradigm, a view of human communication based on the conception of persons as homo narrans.
Organizational intelligence (OI) is the capability of an organization to comprehend and create knowledge relevant to its purpose; in words, it is the intellectual capacity of the entire organization. With relevant organizational intelligence comes great potential value for companies and organizations to figure out where their strengths and weaknesses lie in responding to change and complexity.
Simon Anholt is an independent policy advisor who has worked to help develop and implement strategies for enhanced economic, political and cultural engagement with other countries.
Value network analysis (VNA) is a methodology for understanding, using, visualizing, optimizing internal and external value networks and complex economic ecosystems. The methods include visualizing sets of relationships from a dynamic whole systems perspective. Robust network analysis approaches are used for understanding value conversion of financial and non-financial assets, such as intellectual capital, into other forms of value.
Organizational memory (OM), sometimes called institutional memory or corporate memory, is the accumulated body of data, information, and knowledge created in the course of an organization's existence. The concept of organizational memory includes the ideas of components knowledge acquisition, knowledge processing or maintenance, and knowledge usage like search and retrieval. Falling under the wider disciplinary umbrella of knowledge management, it has two repositories: an organization's archives, including its electronic data bases; and individuals' memories.
A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning. Wenger then significantly expanded on the concept in his 1998 book Communities of Practice.
A network-centric organization is a network governance pattern which empowers knowledge workers to create and leverage information to increase competitive advantage through the collaboration of small and agile self-directed teams. It is emerging in many progressive 21st century enterprises. This implies new ways of working, with consequences for the enterprise’s infrastructure, processes, people and culture.
The Mountain Quest Institute (MQI) is a research, retreat and conference center on 450 acres (1.8 km2) in Pocahontas County, West Virginia in the Allegheny Mountains of the United States. MQI claims three "quests": the Quest for Knowledge, the Quest for Meaning, and the Quest for Consciousness. MQI promotes itself as scientific, humanistic and spiritual and claims to find no contradiction in this combination.
A chief learning officer (CLO) is the highest-ranking corporate officer in charge of learning management. CLOs may be experts in corporate or personal training, with degrees in education, instructional design, business or similar fields.
Air Force Knowledge Now (AFKN) is a web-based collaborative environment developed by Triune Group for the U.S. Air Force (USAF). From 1999 to 2012, AFKN grew to more than 19,000 Communities of Practice (CoPs) and 400,000 members. In 2004, Air Force CIO John M. Gilligan designated AFKN the Air Force Center of Excellence for Knowledge Management, making it the USAF's only certified and accredited enterprise-wide knowledge management program. By focusing on social, behavioral and cultural aspects of knowledge sharing, AFKN evolved beyond traditional knowledge management systems, which focused on capturing information through technology.
David Weinberger is an American author, technologist, and speaker. Trained as a philosopher, Weinberger's work focuses on how technology — particularly the internet and machine learning — is changing our ideas, with books about the effect of machine learning’s complex models on business strategy and sense of meaning; order and organization in the digital age; the networking of knowledge; the Net's effect on core concepts of self and place; and the shifts in relationships between businesses and their markets.
A knowledge organization is a management idea, describing an organization in which people use systems and processes to generate, transform, manage, use, and transfer knowledge-based products and services to achieve organizational goals.
Arnold Kransdorff is a British author, business historian and publisher who was the first to identify and directly address the phenomenon of corporate amnesia in the early 1980s, soon after the flexible labour market started to make a significant impact on job tenure and related productivity growth. He specialises in the Knowledge Management (KM) discipline of knowledge transfer of Organisational Memory (OM) to successive generations of replacements.
Ross Dawson is an Australian author, futurist, entrepreneur and former stockbroker. Best known for his 2002 book 'Living Networks', Dawson founded the futures think tank Future Exploration Network and consults on digital futures to various big organisations such as Ernst & Young, Macquarie Bank, Microsoft and News Corp.
Richard Barrett, is a British author who writes about leadership, leadership development, values, consciousness as well as cultural evolution in business and society. He is responsible for developing the theory of the Universal Stages of Evolution, the concepts of personal and cultural entropy, and creating assessment instruments to map the values of individuals, organisations, communities and, nations to the Seven Levels of Consciousness Model. He founded the Barrett Values Centre in 1997.
A world café is a structured conversational process for knowledge sharing in which groups of people discuss a topic at several small tables like those in a café. Some degree of formality may be retained to make sure that everyone gets a chance to speak. Although pre-defined questions have been agreed upon at the beginning, outcomes or solutions are not decided in advance. The assumption is that collective discussion can shift people's conceptions and encourage collective action. Events need to have at least twelve participants, but there is no upper limit. For example, in Israel in 2011 an event called 1000 Tables was hosted in several cities on a single day as part of a series of social justice protests held around that time, and around a thousand people participated.
