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By Bob Bater
 Carpe diem! Organisations of all types are in dire need of the skills of information professionals. With information production growing exponentially, who else is so well-placed to organise it for later retrieval when required? OK, we don't exactly stand out on the CEO's radar yet, but information and knowledge management is in such a mess in many organisations that the bells are going to ring sometime soon. And that means CEOs are going to understand the significant costs of failing to manage information and knowledge.
Information matters
Those costs are quantified by a CapGemini report (1) in March 2008, which claimed:
‘Overall, our research suggests that poor utilisation of information assets equates to an annual £46 billion missed opportunity for private sector profits, and £21 billion in administrative costs across the public sector.'
Compounding the problem, is the phenomenal growth of digital information resources. A report by EMC/IDC in March 2008 (2) estimated that the digital universe in 2007 comprised 281 exabytes (1 exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes), and that by 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006.
Many look at figures like this and see a threat. But information professionals should see nothing but opportunity. If information production is growing so fast, then information must be important.
So, information matters! Which is also the title of a report published by the UK government in November 2008 (3). In the introduction, Sir Gus O'Donnell, Head of the Civil Service and Cabinet Secretary, writes:
‘Good information management needs to be partnered with good knowledge management. If it isn't, the value of information as an asset is undermined, and cost effective, efficient service delivery is compromised.'
At long last, we have people high-up in government, as well as respected consultancies saying what information professionals have been saying all along. And we have numerous reports and case studies to provide us with the ammunition needed to get information and knowledge management onto the Board agenda.
Managing information and knowledge together
When CEOs come to understand the message behind the figures, information professionals must be ready with an expanded understanding of the vital interaction of staff knowledge and information accessibility in supporting the organisation's business processes. We need a toolkit fit for the purpose comprising not just the tried-and-tested IM tools, but new ones which help us understand how people, processes and information interact, how we should help our clients to respond to emergent opportunities, and how we can support the unstructured, informal exchange of knowledge.
However, managing information and knowledge together - as Gus McDonald suggests - isn't going to be easy. It's going to need some new tools, beyond the familiar information management tools we've been throwing at knowledge management problems (to no avail) for years. We're going to need the skills and tools for managing information and knowledge holistically - the skills and tools of the Knowledge Architect.
Simply stated, the new kind of problem we face is that information needs knowledge and knowledge needs information - a truism that seems to have been largely ignored by the recent histories of both information management and knowledge management. Without information to feed it, we can have no knowledge. And without knowledge, information is useless.
Let's illustrate that. Suppose I want to cross the road at a pedestrian crossing. The information at my disposal is the colour of the pedestrian crossing lights - usually red or green. But I'm also aware of the traffic noise, so even if the light is green, if I hear a vehicle approaching which seems not to be slowing down, I'm wise not to cross before double-checking visually whether some vehicle is unaware of its red light.
Boisot (4) models this interplay between data, information and knowledge very clearly in terms of cognitive psychology. All the visual and aural stimuli - data - I receive are filtered perceptually to leave only those relevant to my immediate purpose. I then filter those data feeds conceptually to interpret what the green light tells me and what the vehicle sounds tell me. That's my information.
But without a pre-existing knowledge structure in my brain, I can't decide how to act on that information. My prior experience needs to tell me that I'll get mangled if I ignore the sound of the fast approaching vehicle and trust the green light. Without that prior experience - knowledge - the information I receive is useless. And equally, my prior knowledge has no value until it is fed with the information needed to take my intended action.
Wild information
In the organisational environment, the problems with information tend to arise from the fact that legacy information systems were designed in silos to serve a specific function, regardless of others. This produces what I call ‘information in the wild', simply because it recognises no rules beyond that of its own species. The result is what we can call ‘Information Scatter' - information is scattered among all manner of different, incompatible information systems, all adhering to their own standards regardless.
So, when trying to manage information from a unified corporate perspective, we commonly encounter the sorts of problems illustrated by Louis Rosenfeld in his Enterprise Metadata diagram (5). Briefly, this addresses the twin problems of ‘information in the wild' and ‘Information Scatter' and illustrates how entities or attributes can be represented and referenced differently in different information systems. So, ‘William Jones' in one system is ‘Bill Jones' in another. ‘Author' in one system is ‘Creator' in another. And ‘Date' in one is in US mm-dd-yyyy format, while others use the European dd-mm-yyyy format or the (correct!) ISO standard yyyy-mm-dd. These seemingly trivial details pose significant problems when trying to manage information across the enterprise.
Knowledge presents a quite different set of challenges. Can we really manage something which is intangible, only partially controllable, highly personal and ever-changing? The only sensible answer is no. But we can encourage and enable its growth and its flow, and Web 2.0 applications offer new ways of doing that. They don't, however, lend themselves well to ‘being managed' and still sit largely outside the scope of our conventional IM tools.
Yet email, blogs & wikis only carry knowledge that gets written down. Alongside these ‘visible channels' there are other, informal channels - like the telephone and instant messaging, conversations at the coffee machine or in the corridor - which carry a vast daily exchange of unwritten knowledge which remains entirely untouched. We can't capture that knowledge directly and shouldn't try. But we can find out who talks to whom, and for what reason, and that's a crucial step towards supporting and sustaining this vast untapped resource.
Three frameworks for consideration
So where do we look for tools and techniques to help us achieve this symbiosis of information and knowledge? There are three in particular which seem to offer potential. Dave Snowden's Cynefin Framework (6), based on the premise that organisations are complex adaptive systems, defines five domains in which we interact with experience, use information, and apply our knowledge - the Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic and Disorder. Snowden's sensemaking approach describes how discernible cause-and-effect dwindles from the Simple to the Complex and is absent from the remaining two. Since causality is the basis for sustainable praxis, recognising the domain inhabited by different knowledge exchanges allows us to nurture effective practices from the ‘emergent' (Complex), to ‘good' (Complicated), to ‘best' (Simple).
In Boisot's I-Space, the efficiency and effectiveness of transfer of information or knowledge is characterised along three key vectors, Concrete-Abstract, Uncodified-Codified, and Undiffused-Diffused. Concrete knowledge is purely experiential, unrefined, and contaminated with ‘noise', but may be ‘cleansed' and condensed to the abstract. Uncodified knowledge has little structure and requires effort to extract useful knowledge; codification makes it far more accessible.
Abstract, codified knowledge is most easily diffused and converted into organisational value, but abstraction and codification dilute semantics and may prove self-defeating in some cases. Differing degrees of uncertainty and risk therefore accompany certain types of knowledge, and this can have profound effects not only on how people use the different types, but also on the type of people motivated to use them.
Finally, the developing practice of Social Network Analysis (SNA) (7) uses a variety of methods to identify the nodes (people) active in a knowledge-sharing network, and to characterise their contributions in terms of various roles and types of ‘ties'. For instance, some may act as gateways for knowledge flow between one cluster of nodes and another cluster; others may act as hubs, to which much of a cluster's knowledge gravitates.
Recognising that organisations are complex adaptive systems, employing sensemaking techniques to understand how useful activity is sustained by knowledge and information, and identifying the social networks through which much of it flows, will become essential components of the Knowledge Architect's toolkit alongside the conventional tools of information management.
This article is based on a paper presented at the INFuture 2009 conference ‘Digital Resources and Knowledge Sharing', held in Zagreb, Croatia, 4-6 November 2009.
http://infoz.ffzg.hr/INFuture/index.aspx
References
1. The Information Opportunity Report. Cap Gemini, March 2008
2. The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe http://digbig.com/5bbaan
3. Information Matters. Knowledge Council, 2008
4. Boisot, Max H. et al.. Explorations in Information Space: Knowledge, Agents, and Organization. Oxford: OUP, 2007.
5. Louis Rosenfeld: http://digbig.com/5bbaam
6. Cynefin Framework, 24 August 2009.
Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin
7. Social network: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_analysis
By Bob Bater
Bob Bater has been an independent consultant in information and knowledge management for over 15 years, working in the UK and in continental Europe. His approach to mapping knowledge and information onto business processes - linking these key resources to business objectives - has supported projects with clients as diverse as London Underground, the European Investment Bank and the UK Home Office. A regular trainer with Aslib in the UK, he has published a number of papers and contributed to several books on knowledge & information management, as well as authoring the 2005 Ark Group report ‘KM in the Legal Profession: Leveraging Knowledge for Enhanced Profitability'.
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