Today I came across an article in The Globe and Mail (for my non-Canadian readers, the Globe and Mail is daily national newspaper in Canada) entitled ‘Mobilizing minds‘.
While the beginning of the article had the usual warnings about the importance of knowledge workers in the knowledge economy, and that catering to knowledge workers was often more important than other corporate strategies, there was a passage later in the article that struck me as insightful:
“Market mechanisms can also improve the flow of ideas. For the better part of two decades, companies have invested heavily in ‘knowledge management’ – but with limited results, because real value comes less from managing knowledge than from creating and exchanging it. A ‘knowledge marketplace’ is one device to promote the exchange of ideas.”
Knowledge management often does have an inordinate focus on the management of knowlege (I guess it wouldn’t be called knowledge management if it didn’t), rather than focusing on the knowledge creation and sharing aspects of work life.
What is implicit to this statement is that ‘management’ usually ends up being an information warehouse (and yes, I deliberately used the word information instead of knowledge). Opinions, reports and methods get written and then get digitally bundled and tossed into a warehouse (which is often called a ‘knowledge base’).
No matter how well the warehouse is organized, there is often little understanding in the organization about how to find things in that warehouse. And unless the information stored is largely procedural, people will just get frustrated trying to find things.
While it may sound extreme, it’s often just a waste of time to spend ages categorizing gathered information — because you just never know what’s going to be important. So instead of expending time and energy categorizing, spend it trying to connect people. And only collect and categorize when it’s absolutely necessary and the value of the content is unquestionable.
This also applies to the management of people, however. When people are managed in a way that allows them to be creative and share, their productivity increases. And that’s really the job of any manager — to foster an environment that allows for creative and collaborative sharing.
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November 6th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
[...] blog posts on the topic have come from Annette and Matt, James Dellow, Gladur, David Gurteen, Lucas McDonnell, Dave Snowden, and Jack Vinson. There are many, many more out there in [...]
November 7th, 2007 at 7:26 am
Hi ,
I enjoyed checking out your blog. I’m a recent grad in Silicon Valley, and I’ve just started a company that is mapping the blogosphere to our world. Here is an example of a blogger in Georgia who’s plugged in: http://www.verveearth.com/landing/#type=user&id=772. It can be fun to explore different localities.
It’s an easy process to get on board, and I can be reached at clayton@verveearth.com for questions or feedback. If you resonate with the vision of painting a global canvas of voices, please give VerveEarth a mention.
Cheers! -Clayton
November 7th, 2007 at 9:24 am
Interesting take Lucas.
I particularly like the idea of not categorizing information unless absolutely necessarily. I think valuable information is often overlooked because it has been categorized (intentionally or unintentionally) as something that would generally be considered unrelated.
However, in the absence of an open knowledge/information sharing environment, how does one go about effectively and efficiently collecting information? In this case, by removing the human interaction aspect of sharing, you are essentially forcing the individual to depend on some sort of categorization process, whether it be effective and efficient or not.
November 8th, 2007 at 7:52 am
Great point Stephanie. The human interaction side of knowledge sharing is essential — it’s the importance of connection versus collection. You had asked “in the absence of an open knowledge/information sharing environment, how does one go about effectively and efficiently collecting information?” — and I think the short answer is, you can’t.
An organization has to be ready to share knowledge, and there is very little that can be done to push it further down that path. While educating management and staff about the importance of sharing knowledge can help, if the culture is very much ingrained against knowledge sharing, then you’re going to be fighting an impossible uphill battle.
As far as categorization systems go, the real tough part is finding a categorization system that is good at categorizing, but is also transparent to the end user. For example, Library of Congress classification is a great way to organize things, but it’s certainly not a system that the end user is going to intuitively understand. Not to mention that everything contained in the Library of Congress already meets a certain standard of quality. The web or corporate information is similar, in that a quality judgment must first be made about the content before it gets into the repository.
Transparency to the end user is a really tough thing to achieve — which is why most end users, when asked what they want in an enterprise search engine, say “something like Google”.
Clayton — thanks for stopping by. I think you’ve got a really interesting idea there, I’ll be sure to stop by your site and check it out.