Information vs. Knowledge

While in class a couple of weeks ago, we discussed (or rather re-enforced previous discussions) the difference between information and knowledge. I started my elevator question with comparing the two, and thought it to be on of the critical lessons learned in the course. While putting it in the wiki, I noticed that someone else that make the same distincition and almost the same wording as I. So, I put together a list of what I could find in the course material and some that I thought myself.

Most of the differences is not simply one or the other, but rather a continuum. Some of these examples are better than others,

Elevator Questions

1. "I see from your transcripts that you took a course in KM. What is KM?"

· To define knowledge management, it is first important to define the difference between knowledge and information. Knowledge is a subset of information and can be described information that has been applied and processed. Knowing how to use information is knowledge. So KM is the process of managing this knowledge so that it can be stored and re-used by an individual or organization.
· There are many definitions for KM and most involve a process of acquiring, structuring, storing, and publishing knowledge. Knowledge management can involve systems, technology, and processes. Personal and organizational problems can stem from a lack of KM and KM can in turn solve those problems.

2. "Tell me how you would apply KM in my organization."
· KM can be applied in many different ways in an organization, but it really depends on the organizational needs and issues. I would start by asking you what are your problems, and then I could recommend how KM systems may be able to fix them. KM is not a set of specific technologies and one size does not fit all.
· For example, if your problem was a lack of trained personnel, I would ask why that is and first try to get to the root cause. Then I could recommend a process or a technology that could help.
· Every company uses KM to some degree. Having written procedures or a intranet portal can be a form of KM. More robust technologies are available to help manage the knowledge within an organization, but again, they should relate to the organizational need.

3. "What KM technologies would you recommend here?"

· As stated in the last question, there are many technologies available and a solution should be tailored based on the organization and the need. There is no one technology that can solve all your problems. I would be more than happy to try to help you evaluate the issues and choose the best for your company. The main reason for knowledge management is to address issues with capturing knowledge. Technologies do not have to be sophisticated, but the change must be accepted by your company.
· Many KM technologies like email, portals, search engines, and document storage are widely used, but may need to be revamped in order to capture and disseminate the knowledge of employees.

4. "KM sounds great, but how do I justify KM here?"

· To justify KM, you simply need to ask yourself what is your biggest asset. Likely in the service industry, 99 percent of people would say that it is their resources. So if your resources or intellectual capital is the most important thing to your company, I would ask how you are managing, storing, internally-sharing, and retrieving your largest asset? This is how KM can be justified. It is about retaining corporate knowledge and making the best use of what your people know so that it can be reused by others in your company.
· KM may be incorporated in existing technologies like email or document storage and justifying the cost is like any other projects. The benefits must be quantified and measured. A KM strategy and plan is the first step in justifying the need to formal KM systems.

5. "KM sounds great, but what KM metrics do you recommend?"

· KM metrics are used to quantify the value and effectiveness of KM initiatives. The KM strategy that I discussed earlier should dictate what metrics are important. If your company has problems with training new employees, then metrics around the time and effort taken to train employees would be important. Metrics must be continually evaluated and used for improvement. They are the means to know if KM is working and must be aligned with the organizational objectives. Every organization will have different metrics and the correct ones for your company must help it improve and evaluate the KM initiates.

6. "Tell me the main barriers to adopting KM I can anticipate. How would you overcomethem?"

· Managing the change of any systems is a major barrier. Most people do not like change and will resist. People need to see what is in it for them. Change management must work hand-in-hand when any new systems are introduced.
· Additionally, a lack of communication and incentives to use KM and it’s technologies often makes people resist KM. Again, the need for KM must be communicated and business processes must integrate the technologies. Incentive can be given to employees for contributing to the effort.
· Many forms of knowledge is very difficult to capture. Tacit knowledge by definition is not easily articulated. Teaching people how they learn and how to teach can help to overcome this obstacle. When training a new employee, the new employee may be able to articulate knowledge learned more easily than the teacher.
· Certain people do not want to be known as an expert or want to share knowledge if they are an expert. People don’t want to be pigeon-holed into doing the same job over and over. In technology, changes are continuous an overachievers want to learn something new and not work on the same thing repeatedly. Additionally, many people are afraid to share what they know for the think that they will not longer be needed if others can access their knowledge. The organization must reward individuals for contributions and find new ways for people to advance.

Week 6a Article Summary

Now for the second part of the reading for this week. I’m taking a little different approach based on the blog questions posed and the length of the articles. I’m just going to answer the questions posed. The headings of the articles are bold, the questions are in italics, and the answers are normal.

The Chaos of Content

List 3 sources of tension between IT and the user community, in terms of enterprise content management.
o Centralize vs. Empower (IT vs. Business)
o Simplify vs. Access (IT vs. Business)
o Manage vs. Leverage (IT vs. Business)

Unlock the Value of Content to Maximize Online Business Performance

Getting the right content, to the right person, is a popular KM phrase.

How can better content enable enterprises to optimize the customer experience?

o Strengthen customer loyalty.
o Achieve unified brands, messages and corporate image.
o Accelerate worldwide product launches and promotions.
o Optimize customer process efficiencies.
o Provide regulatory compliance and security.

Content Management vs. Knowledge Management

The article mentions some differences between CM and KM. Which of these terms describe CM, and which describe KM?
o Capture - KM
o Create - CM
o Route - KM
o Manage - CM
o Convert - KM
o Publish - CM

Is CM or KM bigger in scope, i.e. does one belong under the other’s umbrella KM?

o KM is bigger, more frequent, and more fluid than CM
o CM belongs under the umbrella of KM

Managing Email Overload: The Smart, Secure and Legal Way

Name 3 drivers that dictate what an email management solution must do.

o Corporate Records for regulatory compliance and legal discovery
o Email growth as an IT headache
o Source of business critical information

Name 5 requirements of any email management solution.

o Retain messages in compliance with regulations and corporate policies;
o Provide a highly scalable repository able to keep pace with email volume growth and long retention periods to aggregate billions of email messages;
o Facilitate searching as required for legal discovery;
o Improve system performance and reliability; and
o Integrate email with other corporate records and content.

What are some consequences of not having an email management system?

o Overloaded servers will degrade performance
o Users will have limits
o Expenses for non-compliance related to legal discovery and regulatory requests
o Information that could be shared is lost

Today's Search: All The Power. No Pain.

What are some criteria for evaluating an enterprise search solution?

Information location (multiple repositories), data formats, speed needed to search, need to change the user interface, training time, ability to export data, support, and implentation time.

The Emerging Role of SharePoint in ECM

Do you think SharePoint is a good choice for students to search a discussion forum on COLWeb? Why or why not?

No, the cost is very high for one reason. Additionally, as the article suggests, it is not easily integrated with other applications and requirements for the COLWeb would likely not work out of the box. Sharepoint is also better suited for a large number of documents or forums rather than a sub-system.

Top Five Reasons to Outsource Document Capture

Name the “top five reasons to outsource your document capture project”.

1. Focus on your organization’s core business processes;
2. Improve service levels to clients and reduce transaction costs at the same time;
3. Faster and more secure implementation of compliance and discovery initiatives;
4. Providing near-term cost savings while avoiding technological obsolescence; and
5. Cost-effective disaster recovery.

Will Your Next CMS Scale to Meet Your Demands?

Is content management something you buy, or something you do? Explain.

CM is something you do because it is the process of managing information for you and your customers. The technology that administers CM will come and go, but the managing information is something at you must always do.

The Value of SharePoint-Based ECM Solutions

What are the key chunks of functionality that an enterprise content management system should have?

Document scanning, imaging, report management, business process management, content lifecycles, unified policy administration, central audit logging, reporting and intelligent content organization

How to Correct Your Organization’s Content Myopia

What is the best approach to transforming these business areas with Enterprise Content Management (ECM)?

o Accounts payable - Document Management - streamline and automate related processes—everything from the receipt of invoices and supporting documents through approval and archiving—while ensuring compliance with government regulations and company policies.
o Contract management - Workflow - control and accelerate the contract process from authoring and approvals to execution.
o Client engagement - Collaborate on Projects Real-time - provide secure, central,Web-based workspaces that enable collaboration across projects and around the globe.
o Compliance - enforce government regulations and company policies enterprisewide so content remains complete, accurate and secure.
o New product development - support real-time decision making and reduce time-to-market by facilitating global collaboration.
o Enterprise marketing - overcome the many challenges posed by today’s global marketplace. With the right approach, you can streamline the marketing process and provide seamless access to marketing content. Coordinate campaigns, product launches and ongoing branding and marketing communications. Keep projects on track, reduce overall costs and exert greater control over brand assets using media repositories, creative workflows and virtual workspaces.

Widgets, Wizzbangs and Whoozits

New functionality on your web site should be in alignment with your company's business model.

Give an example of when a discussion forum might not be a good idea on a website.

When it is anticipated that customers may have negative feedback due to turnover or negative experiences.

Is On-Demand Content Management Right for You?

In a few paragraphs, explain when SaaS would be an appropriate alternative for content management?

A SaaS would be a good option if you need much functionality that is not easily found in COTS software. Features such as fax functionality, OCR, and workflow make SaaS a viable option.

Also, if time to market is short, Saas solutions only need to be configured and not implemented. This can be days rather than months. Trial periods can give users the feel without any customizations.

If cost is a concern, SaaS is usually a monthly fee. Costly up-front development costs are avoided and total ownership cost is lower.

If the needs of the business are rapidly changing, SaaS does not require upgrades and new functionality is automatically delivered. The user can decide with updates to take from the SaaS.

Finally, if most of your needs (80%) can be met with a SaaS, then it is likely a good idea. The remaining 20% can be usually be configured.

Feedback on this exercise.

Most of the questions did capture the heart of the articles, but it was a lot of work with the other articles. I did enjoy the articles especially the first one. Personally, I like less struture in the blogs, but this was a good way to get through a lot of material more quickly.

Week 6 Article Summary

Wow, we’re already into week 6…more than half way through. I'm doing the first part of the articles here the the "6a" in a seperate post after this one.

Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning. King.

Figure 1 show the KM cycle model and is very similar to the diagram that we have been talking about in class starting with knowledge in a cloud. The class model goes if my notes serve me correctly…

Knowledge => Capture => Structure => Store => Disseminate => Use => Reuse => Integrate

We also had a simpler model in the second class that went…

Knowledge => Encoding => Channel => Information

So the model presented in the article looks to be much more from an organizational point of view while our class discussions were more general. Sub-bullets under some of the models provides more information and it is interesting that Nokana’s model from reading a few weeks ago shows how knowledge is created. I still believe that not all tacit knowledge can be encoded. Also acquisition of knowledge was not previously explicitly discussed in the model. Before reading the article I could not tell you the difference between transfer and sharing, but transfer is direct learning from one source to another and sharing is putting information out there for anyone to get.

Per the blog question, the learning aspect has been added in addition to the other sub-points. Learning is in almost the end of the process. That makes sense that to learn something, it must be transferred or shared, but how did it get to be transferred or shared in the first place? Something or someone has to learn about something before it can be stored. I would think that learning also occurs in the creation and acquisition phases. It depends on who is learning it. It may be the context that this is how it is perceived from an organization.

The article states that Organizational Learning (OL) is complimentary to KM. It states that they are really the same thing, but OL is a process and KM is the content. Or it also says that OL is the goal of KM. I like the goal inference better and again it is the context of the organization that creates the OL. My original thinking is that KM encompassed all the concepts of OL and I think it still may. However, OL is a unique concept that can be looked at in addition to KM.

Organizational Learning: The Contributing Processes and the Literatures. Huber.

For this article, the four different ways that an organization learns are listed: Knowledge Acquisition, Information Distribution, Information Interpretation, and Organizational Memory. To answer the blog question about where does media richness fit in here, it is in the Information Interpretation. The article is somewhat theoretical in its definition of media richness, but is on target describing it in terms of the enhancement of the sender and receivers understanding of each other. It really does not talk about technology, but given the time it was written, 1991, it would have missed the current technological trends.

Perception of information is enhanced with media richness by adding sensory information. The expression a picture is worth a 1,000 words is true, but a video is probably worth 1,000,000 words. The media richness exercise with the Metallica song lyrics, song, and video was meant to illustrate the power that media can highlight. This article does address the media, but not our current mediums that further enhance the Information Interpretation.

Unlearning is a new term to me and like media richness falls in the Information Interpretation category for learning. It seems like relatively self-explanatory. However; it is a purposeful action that can lead to new learning and reading about is difficult in the context of the article. Unlearning may be getting rid of undesirable information or even personnel. If undesirable learning is hurting an organization, it must drop them. If they are dropped, but organizational memory learning may also need to be altered. Unlearning is in the same category as media richness, but I really do not think that it should be in the Information Interpretation category and may be better suited for Organization Memory. Interpretation to me means how something is learned while memory is what is retrained. Since unlearning is discarding what is learned memory seems a better fit.

This was a very difficult article to even browse. The concepts are solid, but not my favorite article.

Organizational Learning Questionnaire 12 21 04

I really like the questionnaire. In my profession, we have acquired other companies and always start with a questionnaire to gather knowledge about that institution. Questionnaires are useful to access what the current state is for an unknown situation. Although may of the concepts are subjective, trying to give them values it helpful in understanding.

Working Knowledge How Organizations Manage What They Know.chapter 5.doc

I really liked the introduction to the article and it is much easier to read than Huber. The antidote that to be successful you hire smart people and get them to talk is really obvious, but insightful. The article states that getting them to talk is the difficult part and thus the crux of KM.

Getting people to communicate and the barriers to this communication are summarized nicely in the article. Many of the solutions point to promoting teamwork and “thick communication” (as we discussed in class). Rewards and education are other ways to overcome barriers. One of the biggest barriers that I have seen is lack of time. If everyone had time to transfer knowledge, then many problems could be avoided. Setting aside time to transfer knowledge must come from the top of the organization. Differences in culture and frames of reference are also getting to be very common especially with globalization. This may be one of the most difficult to combat and getting face-to-face time is often difficult.

Transfer = Transmission + Absorption (and Use)

I really like this equation and summarizes KM transfer nicely. Many of the barriers discussed are either a transmission or absorption issue. Media richness as discussed in the Huber article can enhance transmission. Almost any KM issue can fit into this equation.

General Discussion:

Difference between Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning

In my own words without consulting references beyond the articles read here, OL is a part of KM and applies to how KM is applied and learned in an organization. As we’ve discussed before, KM can apply to individuals as well. OL is group behavior and how an organization acquires, uses, retains, and applies knowledge.

Difference between knowledge transfer and OL

Knowledge transfer as described earlier is the transmission and absorption of knowledge. Organizational learning is larger, more formal and encompasses the four categories that Huber describes. Transfer may occur, but in OL it states how to get the knowledge, how to integrate it, how to distribute it, and how to retain it.

Difference between knowledge transfer and KM

Similar to the above question, knowledge transfer is a piece of KM. KM is even broader than OL. Knowledge transfer is one piece of KM and like we discussed in class, almost anything can be classed as a KM problem, but knowledge transfer encompasses only the transmission.