« Managing "Measuring" | Main | Performance Management? Say as I Do, not Do as I Say »

October 31, 2005

The Latest and the Greatest

What's the value proposition for your knowledge management initiative? Our colleague Bruce MacEwen offers a fast situational analysis that reminds us why we need to convert knowledge from being an asset to a resource -- in order to get value.

Archestra's common ten cent definition of a resource versus an asset is that a resource is an asset with a job. From there, one view on value is that the asset utilization is more-or-less "productive", stimulating a reward greater than the cost of its utilization. But another view of value begins with the importance of the utilization --as opposed to the importance of the asset (in this case, knowledge) or the utilization's cost.

In Bruce's example, a premium is placed on the ability to access and process preferred knowledge on customer demand. He offers at least two ways of thinking about that preference: immediate availability and proven quality.

In the actual practice of offering knowledge, communications and propositions surround the notions of availability and quality so thoroughly that when it comes to establishing "value" most of our energies are dedicated to closing the gap between perceptions (what we think the knowledge is doing) and prescriptions (what we want the knowledge to do).

Another colleague used to say to me that his number one fear was The Bad Client, who revealed themselves with the persistent position of "I don't know what I want but I'm not gettin' it..." If a target user's perceptions devalue a knowledge offering, the culprits might be the way related information is communicated and the way proposed concepts are familiarized. The idea of "applied knowledge" is a standard way of aiming at generating value, but it takes a pretty good hit when communications and proposals are failing.

Put that way, the challenge of extracting value from knowledge seems inevitably to call for training. Let's not forget that training actually tunes the provider of knowledge and the recipient to each other... But with the intensive business focus on converting the "resourcefulness" of knowledge instantly into gain, two related notions take the foreground: just-in-time learning, and knowledge as the in-the-moment experience of "understanding".

Let's assume that the first notion requires the second. What is mostly interesting about the second notion is how it might parallel the experience of language, in which a seemingly infinite and uncategorized variety of statements may be constructed on the fly.

If, instead of utterances, "understandings" can likewise proliferate in our community, with spontaneous uncataloged diversity from some fundamental common competency, the most important target of our effort to manage knowledge could be more akin to achieving "fluency" than to profit. It should simply be a case of putting the horse in front of the cart. Fluency would explain how and why so many on-demand knowledge deliveries would be successful. So as we figure out ways to cultivate successful on-demand knowledge, we should try to maintain the objective of increasing fluency instead of episodic gain.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at October 31, 2005 10:48 PM

Comments

Post a comment