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October 17, 2006

Where's the "System" in Managed Knowledge?

Swimming around in phrases like "knowledge management" is easy until it comes time to actually do the management. The abundance of innovations for promoting the transfer of knowledge from point A to point B is exciting and often dramatically leaps over old barriers to practicality. But just getting knowledge moved around more readily is no guarantee that any significant achievement results from the activity. By comparison, if our wariness of email's excesses is any indication, we gave up on that kind of naivete long ago.

Yet, getting past the romance and denial in the "knowledge management" label is something most users of managed knowledge would like to leave on someone else's To Do list.

If that To Do list belongs to you, a major first step is to note and remember that knowledge exists in an environment, not in a container, and knowledge users roam all over the environment doing spontaneous and therefore frequently unpredictable things. The idea of transferring knowledge from A to B is about hitting moving targets with items you first have to catch.

To start catching the important items, it helps to categorize them according to why they are useful to you and to the presumed recipients. The users themselves also should be categorized according to what we can expect them to do about what they receive. Otherwise, the constant risk is that you don't get the right thing to the right user at the right time, meaning that the effort is somewhat wastful and, what's worse, discrediting to further efforts.

Taking the idea that the recipients should get what they actually need, the high-level perspective on managing knowledge has to do mainly with context-sensitivity. In pursuit of repeatable, optimal, reliable context-sensitivity, the mechanics of managing knowledge have to take care of combining a knowledge "supply chain" capability with a knowledge "value chain" capability. In the picture below, this combination is represented so that the reasons why anyone should care are exposed at the different points between "not knowledge" (lower left) and "full knowledge" (upper right).

In this scenario, most users are "consumers" and hang out at the upper right. Wandering leftward brings more and more responsibility to be a "producer" -- taking what is there and driving it right-ward, or at least making it highly available and suitable for that. Going from left to right, the "Who Cares" factor goes higher and higher. Having an idea is fine, but packaging it makes it more valuable, and targeting it to a matching audience tops out its probable value.

Meanwhile, going from the bottom of the layout to the top similarly sets up responsibilities and value-generation. Here the most important thing is to handle the transformation of data first into information and then on into knowledge. We already have various repositories that we think of as systems for separately managing the three things . That is, we can point at a data base, at an information base, and at a knowledge base. But often users don't distinguish them from each other, counting on a wild array of tools for search and analysis to force transformations (i.e., "interpretations") from whatever base the user starts with.

If knowledge is really being managed, then instead the different responsibilities of the repositories won't be indifferently violated. For example, what should a database contribute to knowledge transfer? At most, a focus on (i.e., selection of facts according to) a defined subject. Heading upward, an information base should emphasize the ability to associate the data with the circumstantial need. A knowledge base emphasizes the perspective of the user who is actually in that circumstance.

If knowledge is systematically managed, there will be clarity about what kind of value is being generated at the different points in the process of making, saving and delivering it, and users will not hop around randomly in this production environment but instead be guided through it appropriately in real-time as they work.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at October 17, 2006 12:33 PM

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