Do you know the hottest executive title in the Western corporate world today? CEOs (Chief Executive Officers) and CFOs (Chief Financial Officers), step aside, and make way for the CKO-the Chief Knowledge Officer!
After the concept of knowledge management reached the Hsinchu Science-Based Industrial Park, a few of the high-tech firms there were quick to set up "knowledge management departments." Among them was Applied Materials Taiwan, the Taiwanese subsidiary of Applied Materials, which is the world's largest supplier of semiconductor production equipment. The knowledge economy makes its money from knowledge, but how can intangible knowledge be managed? Let's listen to what AM Taiwan's president, Chiarn Wu, has to say.
Q: AM Taiwan set up a "knowledge management department" this year. What is its mission?
A: Our company is a transnational group, so as long as a year and a half ago we started thinking about what kind of new corporate culture we should develop to be able to maintain our leading position in the 21st century. Eventually we established four key elements for our future success.
The first is to be "knowledge-based," because in the future, knowledge vectors such as PCs and the Internet infrastructure will become ever cheaper or may even be free; what will be valuable is the information flowing through them.
The second is "speed," because the pace of technological advance and of change in the operating environment is accelerating, and only quick reactions can keep us successful. But this need for speed requires many supporting mechanisms. We want to turn the capabilities and experience we have accumulated in the past into a knowledge base, so that they can more easily be passed on and built upon, and we won't have to keep reinventing the wheel.
The third thing is to be more "global." Globalization doesn't just mean having bases all over the world. We also have to better understand the characteristics and advantages of each location, to enable our parent company to leverage them more effectively. In other words, it also means greater "localization."
The final point we stress is to be "lean." That doesn't mean we spend every day looking at how we spend every cent, but we have to concentrate on our own core competencies, and outsource other operations to partner companies. Having identified these four essential elements for success in the new century, we have to bring our knowledge management goals into line with them.
To talk about "speed," in 2004 our sales revenue will grow to 2.5 times what it was in 2000. In the process we may hire many new employees, and the increased size of our organization may slow down our decision-making processes. Because of this, everyone needs to learn even faster and more efficiently. That's the purpose of knowledge management-to make sure nobody wastes time searching for information or groping around in the dark. Finding information is a job for the network and the knowledge management system; the job people should be doing is taking the processed information they need, and absorbing and applying it.
In particular, many of our engineers are permanently based with clients such as TSMC or UMC, and are responsible for dealing with problems as they arise. Semiconductor manufacturing equipment costs millions or billions of NT dollars, and depreciates fast too. Any delay in the manufacturing process will cause losses to the client. We are also constantly upgrading the services we provide. At first we simply supplied individual machines, but later we began supplying process technology, and from there we went on to integrating processes across different machines, and then to providing whole-system solutions, along with methods of improving yield, etc. To better empower our staff, we need to do our best to enrich our engineers' knowledge base, to let them have adequate data
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