New Comm Biz

Previously I attacked the prickly area of Trust. This time I want to tackle an equally tricky area: Knowledge.

There are few areas inside a company, large or small, that are trickier to track than knowledge. There’s an entire professional disciple dedicated to knowledge management and even they struggle with how to measure the ROI of knowledge.

The Wikipedia entry on knowledge sheds some light on why this is problematic.

Knowledge is defined (Oxford English Dictionary) variously as (i) expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, (ii) what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or (iii) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation. Philosophical debates in general start with Plato’s formulation of knowledge as “justified true belief”. There is however no single agreed definition of knowledge presently, nor any prospect of one, and there remain numerous competing theories.

Knowledge acquisition involves complex cognitive processes: perception, learning, communication, association and reasoning. The term knowledge is also used to mean the confident understanding of a subject with the ability to use it for a specific purpose if appropriate. See Knowledge Management for additional details on that discipline.

How can we measure something that we can’t even define? It’s a philosophical dilemma that I doubt will ever be resolved. I’m not going to immediately give you the answer to the ROI question just yet. For now I’m going to make the assumption that we all see value in knowledge and we all agree that our companies would be better if we could create more shared knowledge.

For my purposes I would like to use the very loose definition of knowledge:

The theoretical or practical understanding of a subject

Where does knowledge come from? Once again I don’t want to join the raging debate of how we obtain knowledge so I’m going to take a very easy approach. I believe there are two main ways we obtain knowledge, processing information and/or doing something. For my purposes I want to focus on the first of these two.

Most knowledge workers spend the vast majority of their time, finding, processing and creating information. The entire Information Technology industry is founded on helping people inside companies do these three things better. But technology can only process information, not knowledge (my apologies to all the Artificial Intelligence people out there). As one manager said to me, I don’t care about what’s in their reports, I want to know how they came to their conclusions.

Social media and Web 2.0 have given the dusty old disciple of Knowledge Management a new found purpose and a whole slew of tool sets. You think knowledge management was tough in the 80’s and 90’s? Try managing exponential information.

But that’s exactly what we’re asked to do. We now have to search, filter, process and re-purpose more information in a single day than our ancestors had access to in their entire lives. And it’s only going to get worse.

But do you know what the worst part is? For all the knowledge that knowledge workers create, most of it never leaves their head and the stuff that does make it out ends up in someone’s inbox or shared over a phone call or in a hallway conversation. What happens when that person leaves the company? What happens when, even if they stay in your company, someone from a completely different department tries searching for that information on the company intranet? The results are usually the same: net = 0. the company doesn’t really benefit any beyond the reach of that one person.

To date we have seen the first promising signs of social media’s ability to manage and create knowledge. Bookmarks, tags, and other types of folksonomy allow people to sift, categorize and share information as they come across it. Wiki’s, blogs, micro-blogging and social networking tools allow people to collaborate, share and teach each other in both real time and time shifted. Add increased search capabilities, meta-data and RSS on top of these tools and you’re starting to see the promise in social media and Web 2.0 technologies.

While we’ve only really talked about the value of knowledge as it applies to employees, the same holds true for customers, partners and all of a companies stakeholders.

The great thing about these new tools is that they simultaneously capture information as it’s being created and shared. We will never be able to fully capture all knowledge inside an organization, even if we wanted to, but by enabling and encouraging the use of an integrated tool set with these capabilities you allow the rules of capitalism to apply to knowledge. The more that is shared, the more that is created.

In my next post I plan to show how innovation will also follow the same rules.

Image via Wikipedia

This post is part of my ongoing effort to blog the book I’ve been working on for too long before the end of the year. These are all rough first drafts that have not been edited or even proofread. Comments and patients are requested. You can follow the whole series through the category The Book

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