Knowledge is an important and determining asset in companies. Drivers in the global economy challenge the way they deal with in- and and external knowledge. Our work demonstrates that ‘costs of ignorance’ can be prevented.

Dealing intelligently with knowledge becomes crucial to performance
Knowledge is one of the most important and determining assets in global companies. Various trends and areas of concern are reported by companies with regard to knowledge and related risks/issues:

• The ‘human factor’ has been acknowledged as a major cause for accidents and incidents. ‘Just-in-time’ building and continuous updating of required competencies of employees is a crucial factor for companies to reduce their risk profile.
• Demographic and economic developments (aging work force, shift to Asia, outsourcing, restructuring due to the current crisis) require effective retention of critical knowledge, transfer to the next generation and transfer across regions.
• Units but also companies can not succeed in an isolated way but have to collaborate and share with other units and companies in order to address the challenges they are facing.
• Employees lose productivity by searching for information across disconnected, non-validated and non-compatible knowledge repositories and databases.
• The growing availability of information technology enables companies to share information and proprietary knowledge and collaborate across the globe in a 24-hours business model. At the same time the dependency of business performance of the availability and performance of this IT-infrastructure has increased extensively.
• Global companies struggle with finding the balance between cross-border and ‘open’ sharing of knowledge and intellectual property issues, especially in the context of Asia.

Reduce costs of ignorance
With a strong basis in DNV's technological competence and experience, international presence and independence, we aim to deliver innovative solutions to reduce the cost of ignorance in companies:

• Costly mistakes are duplicated because earlier ones were not recorded or analysed.
• Work is redone because people are not aware of activities and projects which have been executed in the past.
• Good ideas and best practices are not shared which raises overall costs in the company. The company does not apply lessons learnt fast enough which results in delayed product development or missed opportunities.
• 1 or 2 key employees hold crucial knowledge and continuity of operations is at risk when they retire or are being transferred.
• Safety is at risk because staff at the point of action does not have the right knowledge and skills or can not access sources of expertise and information within the time frame of action.
• Information assets are distributed across the company, in various databases and locations. Employees spend too much time to search for information. Employees or stakeholders become frustrated because they cannot find information or knowledgeable people.
• Available information is not validated. Employees use non-validated information in action which creates risks. Or employees do not trust non-authorized information and are reluctant to use this information