Speaking on "Building a knowledge organisation -- the Microsoft experience" at a meeting organised by Confederation of Indian Industry, Raikes said the digital nervous system was the system that integrated the personal computer revolution and the connectivity revolution and leveraged them to boost a company's competitiveness.

The basic steps include making e-mail part of your work culture to make the organisation flatter and more efficient and moving paper forms to electric and create an online "corporate memory"--a memory of the corporation's most important information. Giving his company's example on the shift from paper forms to electric, he said Microsoft today purchased 99 per cent of its requisitions online which had resulted in costs falling from $60 per order to $5 per order.

The three advanced steps are: use of wireless voice, video and data communication, redesign meetings to make them more effective and providing digital dashboards--a one point interaction of corporate, external and personal information to everyone.

Raikes, who heads global sales and support at Microsoft, said soft knowledge such as marketing knowledge and communications systems was the most important knowledge that a company could have.

He said each company should realise the importance of every worker being a "knowledge worker" so that there was no one who simply followed orders. Raikes, however, cautioned that there would be considerable opposition to this concept such as cultural, technical or physical. He said such barriers could be overcome by building of "corporate memory", giving workers the ability to make their work visible on all screens, providing digital dashboards and systems that allow interaction between people who might be physically far away.

Raikes also outlined suggestions for successful knowledge management within the organisations. These include empowerment of knowledge workers, building a multi-discipline knowledge management team, creating standards for corporate metadata and building quick and focussed prototypes as a long product cycle was no longer a successful strategy in today's business environment.