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May 15, 2005

What is "what you know" worth?

It's not what you know that counts; it's how you know it.
Ask any psychic.

I. So, you wanna be a knowledge manager.

What are you, psychic or something?

Ordinarily, you can go down the KM path armed with this:

Data+context = info
info+usage = knowledge
knowledge+history = wisdom

You'd think this would be a good place to have your employees wind up, but that's not what they care about.
Their issue is that they have to go from observing to thinking to deciding to expecting. The path they want you to pave is like this:

Reconnaissance --> Information
Information --> Analysis
Analysis --> Patterns

We're accustomed to leaning on our "information systems" to carry out the reconnaissance and analysis, but do our info systems make us smarter? Only if they interpret the patterns, too. We feel "smarter" when, based on what the patterns mean, we know what to expect.

Why the emphasis on expectation?

Because in business there are two main types of "smarts", both future-oriented -- the kind that reduces risk, and the kind that leads to innovation. By solving problems, and by surprising customers and competitors, the business goes forward and gets ahead. That's where the rewards kick in.

So what do patterns have to do with these benefits?

With the speed of information processing now available, the main problem for a business is not to get enough information on time, but instead to get "the right" information. For the most part, the problem lies in not knowing which information is relevant or "best", and that confusion makes both finding and choosing the right information equally daunting. Result: complexity in the thought process overwhelms confidence in decision-making.

But a pattern exhibits a path that navigates through complexity. This is the kind of knowledge that rates highest, the kind that the business wants.

And who are considered the smart guys in your company? The ones who can either make a path or see one, where others can't or don't.

But how do they do it? More importantly, how do you do it for your folks?

II. Teach a man to fish...

Typically, "business intelligence" comes in with the responsibility of generating patterns from the complexity. This sets the stage for what the business is really after, which is to use the patterns to make decisions.

Thus seeing the affair as having two steps, we can look at what essential challenges the knowledge manager will need to overcome.

The first step, "intelligence", is critically dependent on information discovery. We realize that the diversity of the company's employee and customer population means that there is a lot of information distributed in ways and places that are tended mainly by those people. To aggregate the distributed information, we need them each to contribute what they have. Usually called collaboration, a voluntary aggregation creates a body of information that must be formatted for usability-on-demand. Making contributions voluntary is a tough prerequisite worth solving only if their usability is also known to be within reach. Altogether, this is the heavy lifting that changes the way most people can get things done. Even exceptionally gifted "knowledge workers" or experts like Infoworld's Jon Udell rely mainly on this capability enhancement.

The second step, "interpretation" of patterns developed from business intelligence, is about what people will decide to do. It has most often gone by names that we (except for marketers) don't attach to information systems, names like "wisdom", "insight", and "intuition"... Too often hopelessly confused with each other, they seem unmanageable or evangelically mystical.

Fortunately, each mode of interpretation can be seen generating a distinctive kind of "findings" which have practical value in support of decision-making. But these kinds of findings are something that we need to get our hands on -- and then record, repeat, compare, associate, and so on -- from less than supernatural sources. People, histories and systems can all variously help, but the full value comes from covering all the interpretative modes:

Wisdom --> Probabilities (operations)
Insight --> Implications (tactics)
Intuition --> Foresight (strategy)

III. The Payoff...

This consistently future-oriented perspective on the value of knowledge is naturally where KM needs to bank, strategically empowering risk management and innovation on demand.

Ultimately, what the business wants from knowledge is explanations for "what kind of risk did we decide to take?" and "how is this going to give us a new advantage?" Bottom line: "What makes you think that?"

Managers should have a bird's eye view of the plan for keeping those explanations coming.

- A certain amount of excitement comes with realizing that a description consisting of foresight followed by implications and then probabilities yields... a business case!

- And, accompanying the aggregation that initially supports decision making, critical review finishes off the job.

- Under the umbrella presumption of their "experience", we should look to other people for both the content to aggregate and for the terms of a critique. The manager's challenge is to determine when and how.

In the end, cleared of hype, the business point of actually managing knowledge is to get beyond knowledge per se, and into an accountability of expectations.

It's also clear that management should set expectations of KM's deliverables accordingly.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at May 15, 2005 10:04 PM

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