Taking stock of knowledge

I would like to begin this column with a quote from Alexander Graham Bell: "Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the co-operation of many minds."

Organisations are losing people and therefore knowledge at an alarming rate.

Losing the knowledge

This past week we had an interesting young man visit us from Canada. He is Prof Nick Bontiss and he has a passion for knowledge. Since we last thought about the topic of knowledge management, a lot has happened and I think it definitely deserves another look.

So, what is going on out there? Well, for starters things are really tough. Organisations are losing people and therefore knowledge at an alarming rate. The cost of knowledge transfer is increasing and the time to do it in is decreasing.

The time to market is decreasing and competition from all quarters is quite happy to fill the gap. Innovation needs to be a continuous and rapid flow; the interval between new product releases is shrinking continuously. Organisations are continuously re-organising and loosing the tacit knowledge that often smoothes the process flow in the organisation. The documented information available in the world is doubled every 11 hours (statistic courtesy of Nick Bontiss). Therefore you would go to bed tonight and wake up tomorrow morning only half as smart as you were last night. What to do with it all!

Somewhere at some convergence point we arrive at the realisation that we need to take the idea of knowledge in the organisation much more seriously and that we need to understand both the static and dynamic nature of it. Static in the knowledge as it is stocked (really the domain of intellectual capital), which represents a snapshot in time; and dynamic as the knowledge is acquired and applied which represents a flow (knowledge management). This in itself needs to be an incredibly smooth process. So think about it; stock and flow, stock and flow. The smoother this process is in the organisation, the better we are at leveraging the knowledge assets. This process represents the inflow, capturing, application and outflow of knowledge.

There is a key insight here. The very value of knowledge is in its use. Just storing it has very little or no value. It is the flow that represents knowledge at work.

Once upon a time we saw the topic of knowledge in the organisation fairly narrowly, now we understand that it touches every aspect of the organisation. It affects the way in which we deal with customers and how we think about markets. It also determines how effective we are at innovation and implementation, and it certainly affects the way in which our people feel about our company, and how effective we are at really tapping into their capabilities. It certainly has a significant impact on the way we think of the value of organisations. One day very soon, it will have a significant impact on the value that the market puts on our companies.

By its very nature it is a complex topic. It is achieved only by applying a multitude of disciplines, everything from information technology to psychology. It is certainly not just about technology, though that plays a role, it is not just about a managed process, although that is crucial, it is about changing mindsets and getting the whole organisation behind the programme, and yes that does eventually mean everybody. But it has to start with senior executive sponsorship.

It is about collaboration. This is not something that comes easy to most organisations in our society. We are not really into hanging out together and sharing. We are in fact much more into protecting our knowledge (roughly translated into protecting our turf). There is not yet a pervasive understanding of the new economic principle that usage increases value.

It gets scarier as we understand that it is not only about coming to grips with what we know we know, but also with what we know we don't know and furthermore, with what we don't know that we don't know. A bit of a conundrum, deliberately so to emphasise the issues.

How does one eat this elephant? As usual, one bite at a time!

The key is to identify an area of real need, where a team can be assembled, which can work together and be visible as a prototype and role model. Where some real benefits can flow and where a programme can be managed. Understanding the real business issues and quantifying the payback can turn the fairly soft topic of knowledge management into a business reality.