The Need for Knowledge Management

The increasing use of electronic group collaboration tools to support team work has fueled interest in the ways by which what goes on when people use those tools can be captured, stored, and re-used by others. Called ‘knowledge management’, this is important for enterprises whose principal currency is knowledge, rather than physical or financial resources. These are enterprises who have always been wholly devoted to knowledge work, such as consultancies; a growing number of enterprises who discover that knowledge of how to produce products is as salable as the products themselves; and any enterprise who realizes that its knowledge is an asset to be managed.

The ability of enterprises to manage knowledge as an asset (and provide a return on investment and potentially revenue) is seen by strategies such as Agility (1) as the key to survival in a global business environment in which the efficiencies of mass production of commodity goods have been successfully exported to low-wage economies.

The core issue of knowledge management is to place knowledge under management remit to get value from it – to realize intellectual capital. That intellectual capital can be regarded as a major determiner of the difference between a company’s book price and the total value of its stock. For a successful company, this difference can be considerable, representing the difference between the way the company is seen by accountants and by the market. For example, there is a great difference between the book price and share value of recently-launched biotechnology companies, whose market value is clearly based on their knowledge assets, rather than traditional capital.

However, while the world of business is experienced in managing physical and financial capital, companies have difficulty in finding cost-effective solutions to simple practical questions concerning knowledge, such as:

• “We have four people in Boston who know how to solve this problem. How can we get them to help our team in Korea?”
• “People are leaving the company with a lifetime’s experience. How can we capture and re-use that?”
• “We had a team that did a successful proposal for aerospace five years ago. Why did they make the decisions they did? How did they deal with the customer? What made the team tick?”
• “How do we start learning from our experiences and help our people stop repeating others’ mistakes?”
• “We’re involved in an exciting project with four other companies. How can we all learn how these virtual teams tick?”
• “Needs change often these days and we’re always bringing new people into projects. How can we get them up to speed and contributing quickly?”

While there are no categorical or perfect answers to any of these questions, a powerful set of solutions involves one of the electronic collaboration tools used for today’s distributed group work, as will be explored in this paper. These solutions address three current trends that are making knowledge management especially significant today:

• need (post-industrial, knowledge-based commerce),
• awareness (growth of interest in virtual teaming and knowledge management),
• accessible technologies (electronic collaboration tools).

This combination makes now a defining moment for organizational computing. By understanding these challenges, then appreciating the capabilities of available technologies, and then knowing how to build virtual teaming skills and create knowledge management strategies, enterprises can seize this moment and dramatically increase their ability to compete into the next century.

2. Operational Characteristics of Knowledge :

There is no easy way to usefully define a concept as complex as knowledge. One-liners remain feebly abstract (“Knowledge is useable information”), encyclopedic treatises dismay the reader with detail. Here we will pragmatically define knowledge in terms of those operational characteristics that we must appreciate if we are to capture, store and utilize knowledge to sound business ends.

Knowledge is a Human Capability

The authors regard knowledge as a human capability rather than a property of an inanimate object such as a book or computer record. We see knowledge as a personal capability like a skill, experience, or intelligence: a capability to do or to judge something, now or in the future. This capability can be acquired by an individual as a result of reading, seeing, listening to, or feeling (physically or emotionally) something. What is read, seen, heard or felt is not the knowledge, rather it is the medium through which knowledge may be transferred. Note that one says “Here’s the information you wanted about …..” but not “Here’s the knowledge about …”. In our language we recognize that knowledge is the result of a personal transform.

Knowledge Acquisition is a Dynamic

The above distinction is important. It means that “knowledge management tools” don’t really manage knowledge, but help capture, organize, store and transmit source material from which an individual may acquire knowledge. Whether an individual does acquire knowledge from a source depends on a dynamic interaction in which two factors are important here:

• The similarity between the person’s context (their situation, history and assumptions) and the context described,
• The degree of congruence between how the material is structured and how the structure of the domain appears to the reader.

Hence we see the acquisition of knowledge (and especially business knowledge) as highly dependent on two very subjective constructs: context and structure. A report that transfers knowledge to one person may not transfer it to another if they do not share sufficient context with the author to understand what is described or cannot employ the material in way in which it is structured.

Knowledge is Generative

Having knowledge means having an appreciation at the level of a map or a web, rather than a non-dimensional data point, or a one-dimensional fact. It means one can explain, explore and apply interpolations and abstractions. Most importantly to have knowledge means that one can generate new appropriate statements about a subject, not just reproduce the statements that were received. (To be a licensed London black cab driver, candidates have to pass an examination which takes two to three years’ preparation. The examination tests their ability to describe the location of every street and major building in Greater London, and to construct the best route from any place to any other place under different traffic conditions. London cabbies call this qualification “The Knowledge”.)

Knowledge is Elaborate

While one talks of “a piece of information”, one refers to “a body of knowledge”. That “body” is an extensive, organized set of information. It comes in large packets. Knowledge does not come in soundbites. It’s transferred through courses or books, or acquired through experience. The expectation is that people acquire knowledge (learn) over days or weeks rather than minutes and hours.

Knowledge about work is Best Acquired through Work

Knowledge about work can be best acquired (learned) through work itself. A whole field of learning, ethnomethodology, has grown up around the superiority of learning-in-work. Knowledge acquired in work comes without the abstraction and restructuring required to present it in a lecture, book, film or cassette. One less translation means one less layer to deconstruct to map the knowledge to the individual’s own perspective. London cabbies learn by driving the streets of London on motorbikes.

Dialogue is Knowledge

For centuries, books have been published for the explicit purpose of letting others acquire knowledge. Today, enterprises publish great amounts of material internally and externally about their methods and products. We call this publication knowledge.

There exists, however, another type of knowledge which is accessible to the modern business: dialogue knowledge. Dialogue knowledge is entailed in what people communicate to each other in the course of their work. It comprises formal and informal communication and includes any accompanying materials. Modern collaboration tools, and especially computer conferencing, allow what people write and send to each other to be stored, and that stored material becomes a rich base from which people can acquire knowledge.

This paper focuses on dialogue, not publication. While published knowledge is important, and indeed dominates current discussions of intranets, it is an information management rather than a knowledge management issue. Today’s challenge is to capture knowledge from what people say and do as part of their day to day work and to make it accessible to others.

The Challenge of Team Knowledge Management

With increasing emphasis on knowledge-based business rather than production-based business, management is seeking ways to get that knowledge under management remit. The goal is to manage this aspect of the enterprise in the same way as its physical and financial assets. Charged with this are the new roles of “knowledge managers” or “chief learning officers,” with responsibility for creating the environment and process for dealing with knowledge as a corporate asset.

Typically the knowledge management process involves:

• Capture
• Organization and Storage
• Distribution, or better, Sharing
• Application or Leverage

Central to current concerns is the issue of team knowledge management. Teams, ascribed as the powerhouse of the effective enterprise (2), are more intractable from a knowledge management point of view than individuals. By their very nature teams create a great deal of new knowledge, which as such is of high value to the enterprise. However, the knowledge of how and why they created what they created is more difficult to get at than an individual’s knowledge, since it exists in a number of different people, and also in their continuous interaction, a small proportion of which is usually recorded.

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