Knowledge management finally becomes mainstream. (Knowledge Management).

Knowledge management (KM) is finally catching on and might even be considered mainstream by some. Earlier this year, CIO magazine polled its Web site visitors, typically CIOs and business people who deal with IT issues, asking them, "Does your company have a KM initiative underway?" (Rutherford 2001) Of the 330 respondents, 56.7 percent, or 187 respondents, answered "yes." It could safely be said that the majority of organizations in this survey are dabbling in KM. However, there is still some confusion about precisely what knowledge management is. "Dabbling" could mean that an organization is doing many things, not all of them focused on 'access to the unstructured information considered a defining characteristic of "knowledge." But as long as activities capitalize on the organization's intellectual assets, it doesn't really matter.

The July 2001 edition of www.Brint.com, a Web site devoted to KM, had three article titles relating to the latest KM news:

* "Japanese Leading Groupware Company Seriously Knocks the Door..." - Software Wire

* "Content Management Integrates Digital Assets Technology" - Content Wire

* "House Leader Attacks Agency Information Sharing" - Government Executive

These articles suggest that

* collaboration is important to KM

* managing content plays a significant role

* information sharing, while important, must respect privacy

These three elements are absolutely essential to the successful introduction of knowledge management principles.

Collaboration

Most of us work with other people, exchanging ideas, thoughts, and suggestions without a second thought. But when attention is drawn to this interaction and the idea of formalizing it, we somehow get cold feet. What was an enjoyable, voluntary, and often spontaneous activity is now something we are expected to do routinely. This is a paradox of the Internet Economy, in which we live and work.

In the book e-Volve, Rosabeth Moss Kanter points out that "... recognizing the ways in which it (KM) intersects with social institutions and human relationships ... poses three challenges to everyone engaged with the Internet:

1. The Internet can greatly empower and connect people, but it can also isolate and marginalize them.

2. The Internet can enable user communities to form and grow, but it can also use them to attack and deny.

3. The Internet can help build businesses and communities, but it can also destroy them" (Moss Kanter 2001).

Capitalizing on the technologies available today requires the development of special relationships among the people who use them. Technology as a simple, labor-saving device only required that we develop the physical skills to use it expertly (e.g., secretaries learned how to type, data entry clerks learned how to keypunch, assembly line workers learned how to operate riveting machines, paper makers learned how to mix pulp). The individual knowledge and experience we developed helped us do our jobs, but using these attributes really had little to do with the technology.

Today, technology is not just a labor-saving device; it is totally embedded in the work we do. Look at a business process and its activities: In many cases, the hand-off between individuals who perform specific tasks takes place inside the technology. In the wired world of work, the record (information and knowledge) cannot be separated from the process.

Technology is fundamental to conducting business, and core business processes are so highly automated that information technology (IT) systems actually contain and perform them. As technology's reach expands to include customers and suppliers, the number of people involved in the process increases exponentially. As process and technology become one, so the people involved in the process become one. They form a unique team or community with common bonds and objectives. It should be in every team member's best interest to share ideas with other team members, whether they are customers, suppliers, or employees.

In order to encourage collaboration and avoid the complications cited by Moss Kanter, there is a need to be sensitive to team members' needs. Just as employees happily collaborated before being asked to do so, team members need to feel a sense of immediate gratification. In brain-storming exercises, for instance, this means people feeling powerful and satisfied when others listen and consider their ideas. When only efficiency is considered, an introduction to KM processes too often ignores the human aspect. The "community of interest" lets team members

* communicate freely and push back when appropriate without fear of criticism

* participate when, and if, they have something valuable to contribute

* acknowledge their membership in an identifiable community

* develop a common language and responsibility for successful completion of the process

If the process and the culture, otherwise known as "a set of learned behaviors," bypass the need for individual satisfaction, then the opportunity for collaboration and community fails. Since KM is about sharing what is known so that information can be used or applied by others, collaboration and communication are absolutely essential.

Content Management

The lines between content management, document management, and portals continue to blur, making it difficult for people to determine what they need. A convergence between the three is expected to continue, but what the technology is called will not matter as much as the functionality that the product provides.

A recent look at Content Management by IDC suggests, "This year marks a convergence of technology and demand that has sparked a new generation of information systems. Although information technologies, such as search engines and categorizers, have existed for a number of years, they were computationally intense applications that exceeded the capabilities of most desktop machines and servers. However, newer, faster, and higher-capacity computers have made it possible to put these applications not only on the enterprise server, but on the desktop as well" (Feldman 2001). This is driven by a real and significant need: Although knowledge workers were surfing happily even a year ago, they are now so overwhelmed with information that they are demanding better tools for finding and managing it.

Content management systems are horizontal software applications that are necessary for any process that handles, stores, or exchanges information. Today, that means systems that span the entire enterprise. IDC sees the typical content management system of 2001 taking content from any source in any format through the entire process of acquisition, aggregation, organization, maintenance, security and protection, information access and search, and delivery.

Vendors provide these systems through alliances or via a central document management system with drop-in modules obtained from a variety of partners. The trend toward comprehensive "technology bundles" is fueled by the demand for easy-to-implement systems that can run quickly with little or no work required of internal IT departments.

Web content management has attracted players from every segment of the information industry. Many vendors are throwing their hats into the ring, including Web-authoring vendors Adobe and Macromedia, document management vendors Documentum, Intranet Solutions, and Filenet, traditional Web-development vendors Broadvision and Interwoven, and online industry stalwarts Factiva and SmartLogik.

Portal vendors such as Plumtree and Viador, data warehousing vendors such as Blue Martini, integrated information system vendors such as Hummingbird, and search engine companies such as Autonomy and Verity are also added to the list. Each sector brings different functionality and viewpoints on what constitutes the "perfect" information-access application. Many small, new companies also abound, most of them possessing elegant technologies worth considering. There could, however, be some "sorting out" of the vendor community as a direct result of the dotcom debacle.

Privacy

Privacy is a big issue, especially as companies automatically collect information about customers, employees, and suppliers. It is a policy issue and concentrates on the appropriate use of information.

Privacy has become increasingly important as the Internet and other technologies have changed the way people communicate. New communications and information systems allow organizations to gather, match, share, and transmit growing quantities of information with unprecedented speed and efficiency. Finding a balance between the legitimate need to collect information and the need to protect privacy is a major challenge.

Anyone applying KM principles, transferring knowledge, and sharing for the purpose of re-use must be fully cognizant about potential misuse. Countries around the world are implementing privacy legislation. The Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), a national IT industry association, commissioned a nationwide survey of U.S. voters in early June to learn about the specific experiences, concerns, and policy preferences regarding privacy protection. Key findings included the following:

* Consumers understand privacy-Seventy-six percent of consumers said that privacy protection is a priority but not a top priority. Consumers consider strengthening privacy protection less critical than improving education, fighting crime and drug abuse, reforming health care, dealing with energy problems, protecting the environment, and reforming Social Security and Medicare. Privacy was ranked seventh out of nine issues of social concern. Sixty-five percent of Internet users say a Web site's privacy policy helps determine which suppliers they will use.

* Enforce existing laws - Seventy-one percent of respondents agree that educating users and giving them tools to protect personal information is better than having one-size-fits-all government rules. Fifty-five percent said existing laws dealing with personal information should be better enforced before new laws are created.

* Treat data equally - Eighty-nine percent of those surveyed said that a privacy law should cover ALL personal information, regardless of how it is collected. Forty percent favor passing laws targeted at specific problems, such as identity theft or protecting financial or health information.

On January 1, the Canadian government passed the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, which establishes rules for collecting, using, and disclosing personal information in the course of commercial activities. In this context, personal information includes those items listed in Figure 2.

The law gives individuals the right to

* know why organizations collect, use, or disclose personal informaion

* expect organizations to collect, use, or disclose personal information reasonably and appropriately and not use it for any purpose other than that to which the indididual has consented

* know who in the organization is responsible for protecting personal information

* expect organizations to protect personal information by taking appropriate security measures 

* expect the personal information held to be accurate, complete, and up to date

obtain access to their own personal information and ask for corrections

* voice concerns about how organizations handle personal information

The law also requires organizations to

* obtain consent to collect, use, or disclose personal information

* supply products or services even if consent to collect, use, or disclose personal information is refused, unless the information is essential to the transaction

* collect information by fair and lawful means

* have personal information policies that are clear, understandable, and readily available.

* destroy, erase, or make anonymous personal information no longer needed to fulfill the purpose for which it was collected

Exceptions to these principles, marked with asterisks, are organizations who may not need to obtain a person's consent if

* collecting the information clearly benefits the person and consent cannot be obtained in a timely way

* the information is needed by a law enforcement agency for an investigation and getting consent might compromise the information's accuracy

Figure 1. Process ibn the Wired World Work

In the Wires World of Work the record cannot be separated from the Business Process

Figure 2. Personal Information

What is personal information?

* name, age, weight, height

* medical records

* income, purchases and spending habits

* race, ethnic origin and color

* blood type, DNA code, fingerprints 

* marital status and religion

* education

* home address and phone number

An Opportunity for Information Managers

Knowledge will continue to be generated and be valuable. The challenge is developing an ability and willingness to use knowledge to its full potential. Today's enterprises face extraordinary challenges as shown in Figure 3.

A major challenge is dealing with the complex knowledge "avalanche" resulting from improved connectivity, increased communication, and an improved learning environment. Organizations must be agile when responding to these demands - they must develop the ability and competence to transform themselves rapidly to satisfy new demands. No organization can do this without managing its knowledge effectively. The role of records and information managers is key to this transformation process.

Figure 3. The Changing Business Environment

Changing demands are driven by ...

* Constantly changing business landscape - New horizontal, vertical and geographic scope - Continous shift in playes, their roles and relationships

* Uncertainty about how to achieve business success - Product centric vs customer centric - Bricks vs clicks

* Complexity - Avalanche of knowledge and its rapid application - Enhanced connectivity and increased communication

Jan Duffy is Vice President of Solutions Research with IDC Canada, an information technology research and publishing company. She is a business improvement professional with a special interest in designing total systems - people, processes, and technology - to support knowledge work and knowledge workers. Duffy is a frequently published author and presenter on the topic of knowledge management. The author may be contacted at [e-mail]

Editor's Note: Products mentioned in the article serve as examples and do not constitute endorsement by ARMA International.

REFERENCES

Association for Competitive Technology (ACT). [e-mail]. June 28, 2001

Feldman, Susan. Trends and Hot Spots in Content Management. IDC. Framingham, Mass. March 2001

Moss Kanter, Rosabeth. e-Volve. Harvard Business School Press. Boston, Mass. 2001. p. 17 Rutherford, Emelie. "KM Catching On." CIO. April 17, 2001