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December 26, 2006

KM and "the Need To Know" Basis

If you're a provider of knowledge, then blogging, social networking, globalization, and other developments ought to be so liberating. The payoff: orders of magnitude more audience for you.

But somehow, it's turning out to just be disappointing. The downside: these changes are actually more work! They have made it far more important to understand how information can travel and how it gets contextualized as "knowledge". Anything you send out might get more abuse or misuse than use.

AND what's worse, the fun of being exclusive isn't there. It's all... less grown up. You have to regress to the old "party in your head" instinct of having more people involved just for the sake of having more people involved. Otherwise, it turns out that you're working a lot harder to be noticed (as opposed to merely exposed), and right when you are noticed, a bunch of people just like you get noticed too -- and it's not even clear that they worked hard for it; why should you?

I'm not happy with all this freedom. Call it an open market if you like, but when information is free, only bums will have information.

All this unrestrained circulation reduces your knowledge to information. Ouch. What are you gonna do?

Well, some knowledge is really, in the first place, just information that is appropriate to a needed decision. In fact, it's not the provider that gave the knowledge, it's the needy recipient that makes it out of the information. In this case, they don't need your stinking knowledge; mere "data" would suffice. What's finally being called "knowledge" here is simply an awareness of facts -- not the provider's awareness, but the recipient's. [Note: clearly, you have to pick your audience.]

Gaining awareness and gaining facts are bundled together in that thought, but they are rudely separated in action. Unless the facts seem appropriate, gaining them is not what amounts to "knowledge" for us. We don't value awareness of facts that we don't care about. Without the value, we don't think of the awareness as knowledge.

This indicates that, because of a difference in context, one person's knowledge always risks being merely another person's information. [Note: send the context along with the info.]

Of course, there are conventions formed to brand certain classes of information more "absolutely" as knowledge. "Instructions" come to mind. Providers who subscribe to the convention enjoy some confidence that their information exchange really is knowledge transfer, because they are aware, in advance, of how it is likely to be used. But we know that it's sometimes pretty hard to understand instructions; after getting them we can sometimes still feel like we don't know anything.

The thought here is that the information may originate as knowledge, but in transit it is just information again, and then it arrives in the recipient's processing where it becomes knowledge again -- or not...

In other words, knowledge is not a material -- it's an effect. It's a condition, different from information in the same way that being amused is different from a joke.

Here's no joke. An article in the "news" says that 2% of the world's population owns over 50% of the world wealth. Some may say that they've heard it before; but this time it comes from research. The warm aroma of validity wafts across the counter, and where before if we thought there was only opinion (and not even convention), now there's "knowledge" again... this time, our own willingness to believe. Frankly, this is the kind of information that many in positions of authority would not like to have circulated. The whammy is doubled by the further news (says Anuradha Mittal of the California-based Oakland Institute) that "unfettered free trade tends to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor".

Speaking colloquially, is it safe for everyone to know this? Or, asked more along the lines of the points made earlier, should this info be passed around strictly on a "need to know" basis? When you think about what people might do with this information, you can understand why some authorities don't want people to "know it". (gasp! say it ain't so!)

This makes us ask about what's going on when managers "manage knowledge". What's the deal? [Parents of preteens, don't get cocky. What follows is not what you're thinking already.]

Here, the key aspect of management is the designation "information of note", which we observe is just like the police designation "person of interest" -- i.e., not quite a suspect, but not quite scott free either. Hey, you there, stay in town, and be ready to answer questions.

Rounding up persons "of interest" is kind of a stretch of our tolerance, but its a practical strategy for the authorities to acquire the person that they eventually really want, so that they can do what they really want to do: charge someone!

Paralleling that, perhaps the real basis of practical knowledge management is strategic roundup of information . But what makes that containment (content!) strategic is not the information that's rounded up; rather, it's what you eventually get people to do with it. -- which is what makes it interesting.

Net: the beginnings of knowledge management are in organizing people to use information in a certain way. Then you have to aim the information providers at those uses. [Note: oh yeah, libraries..]

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at December 26, 2006 11:10 PM

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