Infovark

Puneet Gupta over at ConnectBeam has an interesting post about the Enterprise Knowledge market. He references an intriguing study from McKinsey:

…An individual’s knowledge is self-contained, always available. But in companies—including small ones—it can be hard to exploit the valuable knowledge in the heads of even a few hundred employees, particularly if they are scattered in different locations…

Knowledge Management as a technology discipline is one that I’ve never really been comfortable with. And it’s really only been since I started working on Infovark that I realized why — because using your computer for knowledge is like trying to get your pocket calculator to write you a love song.

Computer’s can’t actually know anything.

To your computer, that brilliantly composed document you just wrote is a bunch of bits on a disk. They are no different to the bits that make up the pictures of your cat or your operating system.

The real knowledge in your enterprise is in your colleagues’ brains. There may be a great deal of information lying around the place too, but that isn’t knowledge.

Let’s look at Twitter. Somewhere, Twitter is a collection of servers siting in a dark server room. Those computers are managing lots of bits on lots of disks. The only thing that Twitter really “knows” is how to connect blobs of data that represent people to the blobs of data that represent tweets.

So Twitter is certainly not a knowledge management system — there’s no managing of anything going on. And yet Twitter is an immensely powerful knowledge catalyst. Huge volumes of information are exchanged every minute. I learn something nearly every day by using Twitter, not because Twitter itself has much to say, but because my twitterfriends are so interesting.

Knowledge, in the Oxford English sense of “expertise gained through experience or study”, can’t be effectively stored, retained, or disposed of. It can’t be centralized or codified easily. Most attempts at knowledge management to date amount to little more than information collection and storage.

This “build a giant library of things we know” approach is a lousy way to transmit knowledge from one person to another. And distributing knowledge is the only sure way of making sure that your organization will retain it. The reason that this “social revolution” is sweeping the enterprise is that by connecting people with better communication and collaboration tools, we facilitate the exchange of information and increase the opportunity to learn.

Most people learn more things from each other than from reading a procedure manual or browsing the corporate library. They learn through on-the-job training and through discussion with their colleagues.

Let’s leave the technology to manage the bits — knowledge is for humans.