The Knowledge Management Connection

Uncategorized information is only useful to the creator.

Source: David Tool, DataChannel, presentation at Documation Santa Clara (conference), March 10, 1998

Actually, uncategorized information quickly becomes useless to the creator, too. Just think about the masses of documents and notes lying around on your own hard disk drive.

Your first reaction as an individual is to try to overpower that pile of information with a search engine. That helps for a while. Then you realize that your hard drive is beginning to look as big as the Web itself.

So you think about organizing that information to make it a more usable resource. But if you're like most businesspeople, you quickly realize that building a library-like catalog is hard, time-consuming work. You give up all hope of classifying your resources in any truly effective way. After all, shouldn’t you be doing your job instead?

So you fall back to that search engine again … and usually end up recreating the same information over and over again and asking the same questions over and over again —  even though you know that what you’re looking for is already on your disk or intranet or that your buddy in the next cube has answered the same question three times before.

If it's tough for individuals ...

As a manager at a knowledge-driven business, nobody has to tell you how important “knowledge” is to the success of your company. You may already have started looking at some of the more advanced categorization or retrieval engines for your organization or department. Or perhaps you’ve brought in that expert on "corporate ontologies."

Or both.

Great. An expensive categorization engine that performs black-box magic on your stored documents ... but still has to be  “tweaked” like an Indy race car.

And a consultant who assures you that in just a year or so she’ll have a dazzling “corporate ontology” ready for you  — after the 75 meetings with division and department heads, a pilot program that runs longer than the Apollo space program, and a result that looks magical … seems as scientific as throwing darts at a dart board … and is as hard to maintain as, er, an Indy race car.

And you still haven’t made a single step toward solving the business problems you started with:

1. Leveraging what you know you already know in all aspects of your business, not just in isolated areas, and

2. Converting communication activities among stakeholders — activities that often constitute 30-70% of knowledge-workers' jobs! — from a huge, amorphous cost of doing business into an explicit, measurable, manageable business asset.

To quote Chris Dent (http://www.burningchrome.com:8000/~cdent/):

Communication is not overhead but is the work itself.

—Chris Dent, email exchange of 21-apr-2003.

So how do you make classification of resources work for you?

First of all, you have to start with a model for that resource and set of practices that make sense. Some of the foundations of the KM Connection model for that resource a described in the following sections.

For additional information, see The KM Connection Model and Methodology.