Knowledge-Intensive Firms and Workers in the Southern Company - Assignment Example

With business and market environments that are constantly changing with globalization, firms from all sectors are called to embrace the use of technology and information communication systems, particularly to manage their knowledge assets (Poole, 2013). However, most organizations lack strategies that explicitly consider knowledge as a core component of firms and their business strategies. This paper evaluates knowledge-intensive firms and workers in the Southern Company (SO) which is a public utility company focusing on production, wholesaling, and retailing electricity in the Southeastern area of the United States (Ruiz, Benefield, Horton, Nielens, & Akins, 2012).

For more than a century, the Southern Company employees have been learning from their predecessors resulting in a workforce characterized by the accumulation of relevant knowledge for use in facilitating a long-lasting commitment to the communities and customers they serve.With this knowledge, the recovery from Hurricane Katrina was possible within 12 days unlike 28 days (McKeller, 2013). According to McKellar (2013), Southern Company is one of the companies with notable modification of groundbreaking solutions characterized by innovation and agility to serve the company’s customers and their communities.

Today, Southern Company deploys the unparalleled and comprehensive program in Asset Lifecycle Information Management (ALIM) that includes Engineering Information management (EIM) and a smooth asset document and data handover to promote maintenance and operations (Weitzman, 2015). In addition, SO has a great program through which it manages documents such a program to store drawing content and updating it with present conditions. In order to improve its document management, SO has invested in including asset references to drawings through investment in strong and productive relationships among people, technology, and process.

This way, it will become possible for technology to support documented processes through clear standards and procedures that can be executed by actual persons (Kavas, Muller, Myers, & Laurim, 2012). Although integrating data quality with the ALIM system presented challenges in the past, the company has developed a data-centric culture that could be supported by technology. According to Mallett & Wapshott (2012), a research and development manager at Southern Company is a knowledge base worker because with a changing environment, to introduce incorporate newly working concepts based on required national and industry standards.