4.2 Stage 3, part 2: Technology and information/content
4.2.1 Technology in context
At the risk of being glib, knowledge management technologies are about deliveringthe right informationto the right peopleat the righttime. This statement is oft repeated – but what does it mean?
In our view, it can be understood as the following elements:
䊉 Delivering– this potentially involves multiple formats, includ- ing web pages, databases, documents; multiple modes of access including mail delivery, web search and ‘agent’ or
‘push’ delivery of personalized information; and multiple channels – desktop and laptop PCs, hand-held devices, and data-enable mobile telephony services.
䊉 Information – this is relevant data, structured information or documents, filtered according to role or preference, and pitched at an appropriate level for the context inhabited by the user. We make a distinction between information and
‘content’, which is a word particularly (but not exclusively) associated with Internet or intranet publishing.
䊉 People – increasingly not just employees, but also the wider community of people and organizations that communicate with the enterprise such as customers, suppliers, partners and other stakeholders.
䊉 Time – recognition that different information technologies have a different time basis, and as such are appropriate for different purposes (e.g. document management systems and web pages – interactive and instant at the point of delivery;
email or news/discussion groups – essentially ‘time-shifted’
or asynchronous; structured databases and online chat – instant and ‘online’).
As we have repeatedly emphasized, only peoplecanknowthings – everything else is just information, and knowledge manage- ment is primarily concerned with how people interact with this information. In this context, if leadership, people and process are the leversfor mobilizing knowledge in an organization, then technology and information are the enablers– crucial elements of infrastructure and support systems which need to be in place if the potential of the organization to maximize value of what its people know, and of its information assets, is to be realized.
The approach we take in this book recognizes that the success of any technology implementation is largely governed by people’s
willingness to use technology-based tools. When it comes to efforts to mobilize knowledge in the organization, workers must be able to be persuaded to modify their behaviour, so that they can make the most of their personal knowledge, by putting it to effective use within the workgroup, to develop new skills and ways of thinking – to make the most of better access to knowledge and information possessed by others, and managed within the enterprise.
The backdrop to this, the essential prerequisite and a primary opportunity for today’s organizations, is the raft of knowledge management technologies which have developed in relatively recent time. To help create this new collaborative environment, systems need to be developed over time to support people in the way they work:
䊉 Providing secure storage of both structured and unstructured information in a variety of formats.
䊉 Enabling easy access to data, information and expertise.
䊉 Making it easy to share information with and get information from other people.
䊉 Searching, filtering and ranking information from the individ- ual’s perspective, to help that individual make sense of what data and information might be at his or her disposal.
䊉 Providing ‘intelligent help’ to assist people to exploit available data, information and knowledge.
Going beyond our initial definition, then, the purpose of KM technologies is to support the creation, delivery, management (including presentation), and retrieval of information. This information is typically corporate in nature (policies, proce- dures, news), but may also be specific to users in their particular role within the workgroup.
One way to categorize the complex and interdependent elements above is to classify knowledge management technologies into three essential elements around which this chapter is based:
䊉 Accessis the foundation: dependent of course on the basic IT infrastructure (desktop and network services, servers and user directory architecture), in KM terms the focus is on access to:
– key repositories (such as underlying information stores – file storage, databases, mainframes/legacy systems), and – appropriate applications (such as basic content creation
tools – typically Microsoft Office applications Word, Excel
and PowerPoint; content management systems and work- flow; and content delivery through portal and personaliza- tion tools.
䊉 Discovery concerns itself with search, retrieval, structuring, aggregation and presentation of information, the interface to the rapidly growing information jungle that people in most organizations have to somehow navigate.
䊉 Collaboration is about working with other people to pro- ductive ends – tools for sharing information or interacting in some way. At their simplest, this includes internet-type newsgroups and discussion forums, and chat. Email also comes into this category, along with groupware tools (similar to, but usually more sophisticated and integrated than, normal internet tools) and a growing raft of specialist collaborative applications.
Unfortunately the available knowledge management software products don’t neatly fall into these categories: the business, information and technical requirements which underpin enter- prise-wide document management, for example, cut across all three. But in terms of defining how people interact with technology, these are useful categorizations and we will use them here to examine the issues and opportunities associated with each.
Before doing this, however, we need to consider our starting point: the stage of evolution of the organization. The challenges posed by the Year 2000 ‘Millennium Bug’ (how quaint that sounds now!) gave organizations an opportunity to raise their standards across the board: most organizations, large and small, are running ‘modern’ desktop and server infrastructures now, and there have been significant efforts to migrate data and applications from aging proprietary systems to new arrange- ments, including data centres (giving significant potential for new data analysis tools to be deployed), while new technologies for integrating legacy mainframe applications offer similar potential to unlock data and information previously inaccessible to most of the enterprise.
But there remains a substantial gulf between the potential of today’s technology and the ability of organizations to exploit it.
One of the hot topics in the aftermath of ‘Y2K’ is ‘infrastructure exploitation’ – making better use of the tools and infrastructure that is already in place. In knowledge management terms (focusing on behaviour) this makes a great deal of sense. But it would be foolish to stop looking for new tools and new ways to
deploy them within the business – exploitation activity needs to be carried on in parallel with exploration of new tools and technologies that might be deployed to help the business achieve its objectives.