3 Fundamental Knowledge Management Questions

Before undertaking any knowledge management effort, answer three fundamental questions:

1. What is the work group? The first task of knowledge management is to select what one might call a unit of analysis or a unit of management. Then place primary responsibility for the content of knowledge management there. This is not necessarily a functional unit. Cross-functional project teams, for example, clearly need a “knowledge space” that is shared. Nor is it to say that the center, the chief knowledge officer, has no role. Some resources everybody needs; if there’s no common knowledge, there’s no reason to be one company.
2. What does the group need to know? It’s important to distinguish between information and knowledge. Information tends to be transient; knowledge, abiding. Every work group needs information management and information resources, which range from magazine subscriptions to databases. You can find out what people need by asking them, and then arrange the fastest, cheapest, most effective way to get it to them.
   
   You can also find out what knowledge they need by asking their customers. Most of us rarely deal with a whole body of knowledge; we nibble on it a fingertip at a time… In the difference lies a core principle of knowledge management: Knowledge should be managed within the context where value is created. Design, development, and deployment of a system to support knowledge management must therefore be carried out with only one organization in mind—yours. Not that of the industry, or even other divisions of your company if they create value differently or use different knowledge.
3. Are you a standardizer or a customizer? For a company that reuses knowledge, reinventing the wheel is a no-no, so it’s good knowledge management to build a virtual storehouse containing the specs for every wheel ever invented. But an encyclopedia of corporate know-how is doomed to become an expensive failure for a shop where invention is the necessity… For innovators, the goal of knowledge management will often be to improve a person’s chance of putting together the right team of experts. One of the great dangers of knowledge management technology is that it can lead you to invest in systems for reusing knowledge when innovation is central to your company’s value proposition. If nothing else, that’s a waste.
   
   By contrast, production strategies for which you mostly know what knowledge you need—and for which the tasks are mostly well understood, the processes mostly routine, and the problems mostly familiar—lend themselves to a knowledge management strategy of codification, automation, and librarianship. Even in these cases, however, beware the danger that technology can be an enabler in the same sense that an alcoholic’s spouse can be one. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid of Xerox PARC warn against what they call “Moore’s Law solutions” to problems:
   
   “Moore’s Law solutions … take it on faith that more power will somehow solve the very problems that they have helped to create…. More information, better processing, improved data mining, faster connections, wider bandwidth, stronger cryptography—these are the answers. Instead of thinking hard, we are encouraged simply to ‘embrace dumb power.’”
   
   Information technology better suits information than knowledge. It tries to change knowledge into information-like objects. When it succeeds, you have a problem.

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