The Knowledge Management Connection 

You don't need vague warnings by business management theorists about the Information Age, the key role of the knowledge worker, competing on the basis of knowledge, etc., to know that you need to pay explicit attention to managing knowledge — no matter how big or small your company is.

The problem is there. It’s real. It’s  pervasive from the day you first start your business. And it represents the primary area in which knowledge-driven businesses can achieve savings, improve organizational performance, and become more competitive.

Think ab0ut it. Do you do any of the following in your company?

• Documentation
• Web content development
• Customer support 
• Product development
• Marketing communications and corporate communications
• Training 
• Sales support
• Market analysis and competitive analysis

Of course you do. Even small companies are already spending huge amounts of time and money to create and manage such knowledge-intensive activities.  But if you’re not addressing the common aspects of those business functions, then

• You are fostering duplication of effort instead of eliminating it,
• You are  wasting money on technology and processes that use competing, incompatible models of knowledge resources, and
• You are losing the opportunity to leverage the integrated, collective knowledge of the organization.

Chances are, that’s exactly what you’re doing. You aren’t alone. Most other companies are, too.

Communication — the common thread of knowledge management requirements

All of those business activities are integrally dependent on thousands of acts of communication every day:

• A prospect looking for information about  your products
• A training person gathering information from technical experts … and passing his  polished product on to customers and internal personnel
• A corporate communications officer explaining to an analyst the differences between your products and those of your competitors
• Exchanges of information in a cross-functional team meeting
• A software engineer conducting an online search for reusable software modules

Such acts of communication may constitute over 70% of a worker’s activities. In fact, communication is the primary activity of most employees in knowledge-intensive businesses: acts of seeking, capturing, recording, managing, and transferring information that rarely show up in formal job descriptions.

And no one measures the effectiveness of knowledge workers in such activities or compensates them for such activities  in any systematic way.