Knowledge Management (KM) means organizing knowledge to achieve productive work, competitive advantage and business value. KM provides a professional discipline for personalizing new technology to help knowledge workers understand and manage personal, organizational and industry knowledge. The tools of Knowledge Workers consist of the personal computer, the Internet, and related technology.
The ability to capture tacit (experiential) knowledge in digital format and share it anytime anywhere with anyone connected to the Internet is a recent phenomenon. Most professionals and business organizations have not acquired the skill sets needed to work productively in this new environment. KM enhances the abilities of individuals and organizations to perform, compete and survive in this new environment.
A structured settlement is a package of financial and/or insurance products, generally including periodic payments, which a claimant accepts to resolve a personal injury claim or to compromise a statutory periodic payment obligation. For purposes of Federal taxation, structured settlement is defined in IRC Section 5891(c)(1).
The structured settlement industry, as well as the larger and related industry of personal injury settlement planning, represent important opportunities for KM. Both industries encompass multiple overlapping domains of knowledge including law, insurance, medicine, economics, taxation, as well as financial and life care planning. Both industries are international. In the United States, the products and services of both industries must satisfy increasingly complex federal and state legislative and regulatory requirements. Within both industries, interdisciplinary and geographically dispersed teams, representing multiple business organizations, interact to perform repetitive work processes with case-specific applications. Much of the knowledge within each industry is tacit (experiential) and/or social (contacts) and has not been captured in transferable formats. Both industries have been slow to adopt KM concepts like standards, performance metrics, mapping, harvesting, benchmarking, and best practices.
The potential applications and benefits of KM for the structured settlement and settlement planning industries include:
1. Personal KM - Knowledge Workers require functional skill sets as well as subject matter expertise. Obtaining functional skill sets requires skill set analyses and learning strategies. Skill Set Yellow Pages provide one methodology for organizing and communicating skill sets within a team or community.
2. Collaboration - Knowledge Workers increasingly collaborate in virtual teams and communities. Shared Internet workspaces provide significant performance advantages compared to collaboration alternatives like conference telephone calls, emails or team travel. Benchmarking and best practices improve individual, team, organizational and industry performance.
3. Information Architecture - Multiple structured settlement and settlement planning participants require different types of information at specific times during their structured settlement work assignments. KM tools and resources permit and encourage organizing knowledge and information on a user-specific and task-specific basis.
4. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - The objectives of CRM include: understanding customers from multiple perspectives; qualifying and selecting customers; matching products and services to customers; differentiating products and services from competitors. KM tools (including help desk technologies) provide new and powerful resources for CRM. Benefits include improved customer responsiveness and loyalty.
5. Product Development - For most of its history, the structured settlement industry has marketed one product (a qualified assignment funded by a single premium life insurance annuity) to the personal injury marketplace. KM encourages strategic and entrepreneurial thinking and provides methodologies for developing and improving structured settlement products.
6. Work Processes - The primary work processes of structured settlements and settlement planning (case preparation; case negotiation; and case closing) are paper-driven and inefficient. Without industry performance metrics and benchmarks, it is difficult to evaluate or improve these work processes. KM provides tools and resources for substantially improving structured settlement work processes. Benefits include: reduced time to market; efficient linking of customers and suppliers; innovation opportunities.
7. Learning - Knowledge work requires continuous and organized learning for individuals, organizations and industries. KM’s primary objectives include increasing learning efficiency. An organization with superior intellectual resources can understand how to exploit and develop its traditional resources better than its competitors.
8. Business Models - KM, and its related technology, create and require new business models and introduce new business rules. The structured settlement and settlement planning industries currently operate with old business models and old business rules. In the words of Kevin Kelly: “as innovation accelerates, abandoning the highly successful in order to escape from its eventual obsolescence becomes the most difficult and yet most essential task.”
9. Business Strategy - Business strategy is the most important context for directing KM. Within the structured settlement and settlement planning industries, few, if any, strategic models exist linking knowledge-oriented processes, Internet technologies and organizational forms to business strategy. Knowledge is fundamental to strategy and competition. Knowledge strategies support and enhance business strategies.
For additional information about “KM and Structured Settlements”, see “How Standards Impact Structured Settlements”. For additional information about structured settlements see "Structured Settlements and Periodic Payment Judgments", "Structured Settlement Definition". For additional information about KM, see “Knowledge-at-Work”.
Comments