Modernizing Knowledge Management

Very Interesting .The discussion took place way back in 2005........
Modernizing Knowledge Management

Welcome to the key conundrum of the technological age—there are more ways than ever before to store and communicate information, and yet it remains locked in human heads where it can't be accessed. For the 21st century organization to thrive, companies need to knock finally the issue of knowledge management—compiling, organizing, and accessing the knowledge that's in people's heads, without putting an undue administrative burden on how people work. Is such a thing even possible? How do you store knowledge for future—and thus unknown—collaboration needs?
In this Q&A, McKinsey partner Lowell Bryan talked to contributing Web editor Howard Baldwin about why it's so important to modernize knowledge management.
Q: Before we start about the future of knowledge management, let's start with some context. What are the current approaches to knowledge management?
A: Right now, most companies have put in place the technological infrastructure thatpermits people to share knowledge but doesn't reallyenable people to share knowledge, categorized in three ways.
There's the give-them-everything approach, in which all the burden is on users to find what they need in everything from Lotus Notes to Documentum document repositories. With this method, you have huge problems with quantity, version control, and obsolescence, but the biggest problem is cost of the search. Some companies have 3 million documents that they expected users to sift through.

Then there's the tell-'em-what-they-need-to-know model. You have staff that produces documents that are sent out and rarely read.
The third approach we describe as trading within a social community, where documents are posted and exchanged by interested users. The process isn't scalable, and if you have 20 to 30 social networks within your company doing it, you never get the information or knowledge exchanged as broadly as you want.
Given the promise that was implicit in these investments, the reality is not as rewarding as people expected 10 years ago.
Q: You're proposing a method of exchanging information, similar to the third approach, though you say that exchanging information harder than managing information—why is that?
A: Managing is what people do know. The problem is that no one is smart enough to know what information someone else will find valuable. At the same time, the authors have low incentives to produce reports. You have to provide incentives for authors to create content—by bolstering their reputation somehow—and you have to make it easy for the user to find what they want. To do that, you have to create a marketplace. You have to make both parties see that it's in their best interest to trade information with each other. You need the market structure and people to act as brokers or knowledge service staffs.
Q: What do these brokers do?
A: They take work off of both authors and users. They maintain protocols and standards for the creation and dissemination of information. An editor working with an author is a broker. The people metatagging the documents are brokers, because they make the marketplace work more effectively. It's real work and different work than those who are doing the code writing. It's the investment in these staffs, which can be 25 to 50 people in larger companies, which actually makes the marketplace come to life and valuable to other parties.
Q: Are we talking about content management system?
A: In a way. It's putting together a single document repository where the articles are tagged properly so that when users search for something, they get what they want. It's not approximate as when you search on the Web. When you have a refined, high-quality library, when only good content goes in, and you're metatagging it, whether you search or browse, you find the same content. You can get in by many different doors. This is about content management, but it's more than that. Somebody has to handle quality control of the knowledge. You need knowledge domain owners to take ownership for what content is in the library. They're part of this brokerage.
Q: I'm intrigued by your talk of incentives.
A: For the marketplace to work, you have provide some incentives. Since it's an internal library, you compensate by improving reputation. You have metrics that inform appropriate people who's writing the content that's most popular. You create internal awards, because there's nothing more motivating to a junior person in a far-flung geographical location than having their name recognized by senior leaders at headquarters. You wouldn't pay people for explicit use, since they're on salary, but you have to make sure that people are recognized and that senior people don't take junior people's ideas as their own. You have documents that are electronically signed. A document only has to be stolen once for someone to never write another document to submit to the system.
Q: This sounds a lot like what companies like some publishing companies do, asking readers to respond to "did you find this useful?" questions.
A: You don't really have to do that. It's pretty easy to watch the traffic and use the metrics that are contained in the system. You can see which documents are popular, and you quickly discover that it really is like a library. If you want to make this work, you have to focus on quality and quantity of the content.
Q: Sometimes you have information you don't know is valuable, because it only becomes so when paired with another piece of seemingly innocuous information. But it seems like too much innocuous material compounds the problem. How do you deal with that?
A: You mean serendipity? That's different than what I'm talking about here. Knowledge is the context you use to make decisions; information is how you think about the world. It's a whole different set of issues relating to information. Someone could use the documents in the marketplace to create more information, someone with a point-of-view that includes other data that they're interpreting. Those ideas will affect how the people reading them think. That's how knowledge gets created—the interaction between two different sets of ideas creates new knowledge. There may be germs of ideas that change your own thinking.
Q: But you need the knowledge marketplace as the foundation?
A: Yes, because otherwise, the search costs of finding what you need are excessive, and why would you take the time to codify the knowledge if no one was going to read it? How do you overcome people's natural reluctance to give up valuable knowledge? You have to create the incentives to make sure they're recognized for it.