It is probably old news to you, but I was taken aback to read an article in Wall Street Journal (WSJ) written August 4, 2014 by Laura Stevens. It said that Fed Ex and UPS use the U.S. Postal Service to deliver many of their ground packages, and Amazon is leveraging our dear old USPS, too. According to the WSJ, “For FedEx alone, the post office delivers an average of 2.2 million packages a day, or about 30% of the express-mail company's total U.S. ground segment… Late last year Amazon cut out the middleman—FedEx—and started taking most of its packages to the Postal Service, analysts say.”
Smart. Very smart. My postman (John) is coming to my house anyway. Why shouldn’t he bring the small items with him? The post office makes some badly needed money to help offset its losses from the Internet cannibalizing first class mail revenues and UPS and FedEX offload a non-core service line. A perfect match.
That is a classic example of having a core competency which can be leveraged for another strategic and competitive purpose that might not have occurred to you at the outset. (Benjamin Franklin, our first postmaster general, as bright as he was, certainly never anticipated FedEx or Amazon.)
The same can be said for knowledge management (KM) competencies and KM maturity.
APQC has found that as organizations increase their core capability in KM (as measured by APQC’s KM Capability Assessment Tool (KM CAT) and APQC’s Levels of KM MaturitySM), the more likely they are to leverage what they know for innovative and competitive purposes. Fluor probably didn’t anticipate that their knowledge communities would become the bedrock of their global business model.
What might YOU be able to do if robust enterprise-wide knowledge management were a core competency in your organization?
Read about APQC’s KM CAT and APQC’s Levels of KM MaturitySM and learn how you can measure your KM program’s performance and raise your KM maturity level.