Something Funny Is Happening on the Way to Knowledge Management ...

"... about a billion documents of all kinds are created every day in the United States alone." (Carey 2000) Steady growth in electronic document volume is expected to continue, but since the predicted disappearance of paper is unlikely to occur any time soon (if ever), there will be a simultaneous increase in paper documents.

Public and private sector organizations continue their efforts to manage this enormous document inventory, regardless of medium. While there are many challenges associated with this effort, in today's highly complex business environment one challenge stands out: balancing the need to minimize the risks associated with the use of records as evidence with the business community's continued interest in retaining and leveraging all knowledge assets, including records. Organizations realize that to remain competitive, they must take advantage of what they know and what they are learning.

Decisions regarding "What should be retained and for how long?" and "What should be shared and by whom?" become more difficult as this enhanced appreciation for information value continues to develop. Over the years, records and information management (RIM) professionals have developed business practices that have proven effective in most situations. However, capitalizing on the knowledge inherent in or connected to documents requires a new perspective and different business practices. Unfortunately, knowledge management (KM) is imprecise; rather than having standards and proven practices, it appears to be a set of abstract principles that differ depending on the organization's circumstances.

Some suggest that KM is too complex an issue for people to comprehend properly. In a recent article, technology analysts commented, "In spite of the industry muscle placed behind KM, users just didn't grasp all this talk about tacit and implicit knowledge, heuristic searching, taxonomies, and a lot of other `cool' concepts ..." (Balla 2000). This is an unfortunate statement because many people certainly do "get it," but they have difficulty implementing a rich KM program when the requirements are viewed from a narrow perspective.

It is difficult to change business practices when they have served well for many years. But for RIM and KM, business practices have an added dimension to their purpose. The continued requirement to balance good RIM practices with good KM practices appears to be contradictory at first glance, but it is important for both information managers and knowledge managers to collaborate in developing business practices that support both.

RIM is important because it provides formal mechanisms for

* determining whether or not documents or objects are records

* defining all records' physical locations and preventing unauthorized access

* establishing appropriate timeframes for transferring records from one status (active, inactive, archive) or location to another

* developing and managing policies that govern records destruction

KM is important because it supports efforts to capitalize on all assets, whether tangible or intangible, by

* providing the framework for consolidating organizational knowledge

* facilitating location and sharing of previously inaccessible knowledge

* codifying knowledge whenever possible, providing pointers to tacit knowledge 

* encouraging collaborative innovation and promotion of existing knowledge as a foundation for new ideas 

* maximizing the value of information holdings through focus on their content

The current debate and contention that surrounds KM and RIM threatens both practices.

Michael Schrage, research associate at MIT and an expert on collaborative design, suggests answering the question, "Is the digital technology in your organization designed to better manage critical information or to better enhance critical relationships?" (Schrage 1997) In the RIM and KM worlds, it is appropriate to replace the phrase "digital technology" with the words "RIM and KM systems" and then ask the same question. Understanding and enhancing critical relationships is fundamental to success in today's economy.

Customers, suppliers, partners, employees, and shareholders have a common interest in the economic well being of organizations in which they have stakes. In the past few years, relationships designed specifically to support economic success have formed among these stakeholders, involving an unprecedented level of information sharing and exchange. The result is a group whose members know each other better than ever before and a tremendous strategic opportunity for an organization to use what it knows to influence all stakeholders. Both RIM and KM must focus on capitalizing on what is known and what has been learned.

Existing information holdings house much of this knowledge, but human insight contributes to its richness. This contribution is enhanced when extant information is organized in a way that supports the need to see separate information elements as well as how they relate to each other. The challenge, of course, is that these relationships are fluid; as information holdings grow, so do the potential relationships between and among the individual elements. Unfortunately, when information holdings are treated as inanimate objects, cataloged and indexed only as individual elements, the ability for anyone to determine relationships among elements is incredibly difficult, if not impossible.

One difficulty is that individual elements are managed according to their type, rather than their potential relationship with other elements. For example, one functional group manages paper records while another manages electronic documents. To complicate matters even further, a different technology may be used to manage each information element. The result is a widely diverse set of policies and practices underpinned by different beliefs and values. The information manager's objective is to overcome these complications without jeopardizing key principles of either RIM or KM, so it is important to bring RM, electronic document management, and KM together.

Some believe that systems management, records management, metadata management, and knowledge management will integrate and become a single broad-based information management activity (Schneider 2000). Regardless of what happens from an organizational view, there is no turning back -- KM and RIM are here to stay. They are complementary, not mutually exclusive, nor should they need to compete for attention. The key challenge is to develop a common understanding of what, why, and when information is retained and what, why, and when information is destroyed.

Documents Managed by RIM

Because they have similar legal and financial risks associated with them, and because electronic records are often sources of paper documents, managing electronic documents may be part of RIM's mandate. Some organizations have a formal RIM function and program originally designed to deal with paper documents; others have a set of principles that everyone is encouraged to follow, but without the benefit of a supporting organization. In both situations, the preferred approach is to manage documents based on policies developed to complement the traditional document lifecycle as shown in Figure 1.

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Often RIM's primary motivation is corporate asset control and compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. There is heavy emphasis on risk avoidance and an assumption that a document is important evidence that could minimize liability at some point during its legally prescribed lifecycle. The premise of document retention is that information contained in a document presents a risk; therefore, it is important that the document be destroyed as soon as legally permissible.

Unfortunately, documents are not always considered information containers that are valuable in their own right. Because the RIM program model is designed to minimize risk and not necessarily to encourage sharing and collaboration, it may be difficult for anyone other than the document's author to reuse it or its content. Because most RIM programs do not break document content into "information units" (e.g., executive summaries, abstracts, main text, graphics, tables, charts, cross-references) that are themselves indexed, it is difficult for users to navigate from one unit to another within a document or series of documents; to access similar units in a document collection; or to access specific units directly. The intrinsic value is diminished because content is inaccessible and, therefore, unusable.

In some instances, the information technology (IT) or management information systems (MIS) function assumes responsibility for managing electronic documents. In this scenario, rules governing document management may be less stringent than those developed by the RIM function, with less attention to legal requirements associated with managing records. For example, retention may be based on standards for disaster recovery rather than on risk and compliance management principles. The electronic records may not be managed in a way that satisfies KM needs, either.

Dan Schneider, chair of AIIM International's Standards Committee C22: Evidentiary Support for Electronic Information, reminds us, "Every repository (file directory, database, or physical storage medium) is potentially discoverable ... Recent history seems to be telling us that an enterprise's greatest chance for legal exposure lies in what might be discovered in the non-record repositories and in the inadequacy of information produced from the official record repositories" (Schneider 2000). From a KM perspective, the risk is that information contained in such repositories will be destroyed as soon as legally permissible, thereby minimizing its potential for long-term reuse.

In many cases, the IT function views RIM and KM as "technologies," ignoring the organizational and social issues. There is little chance of success for either a RIM or a KM program if the focus is on the technology. RIM and KM are important processes, not technologies. Technology is a key enabler for both, but if the programs are designed around technology, chances are their implementation will fail.

Documents Managed by KM

Many organizations have initiated KM programs, not always in conjunction with RIM programs. In some, KM is an identifiable function -- possibly headed by a chief knowledge officer; in others, it is a set of principles that everyone is encouraged to follow. The IT function often initiates a KM program, but it could easily be the human resources or research and development function. The KM program may target the entire enterprise or just focus on a particular department, business unit, or activity.

KM's objective is to capitalize on potential reuse of ideas contained within documents and to support recognition and capture of insights resulting from relationships among various information elements. Therefore, as a process, KM focuses on managing the content of a document, not the document itself. As shown in Figure 2, in this context "managing" means acquiring (capturing, buying, generating), organizing (classifying, indexing, mapping), retrieving (searching, accessing), distributing (sharing, moving), and maintaining (pruning, growing, nourishing) the repository's contents.

[Figure 2 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The KM lifecycle as portrayed does not explicitly recognize the need to dispose of documents. However, once knowledge repositories are created, they tend to grow and will eventually collapse under their own weight if left unattended. When designing the knowledge repository it is very important to study what should be kept -- not everything is gold; consider how these valuable assets should be organized; and determine how long the knowledge should be retained. We must recognize that people who retrieve unstructured information often have quite different cognitive processes than those who are responsible for putting the information away. In addition, the long-term value of knowledge is not dependent on its value at the time of creation.

Responsible organizations are proactive in their efforts to manage and organize their knowledge repositories, recognizing that a poorly organized, over-populated, or obsolete repository will quickly fall into disuse. Knowledge repository contents must be continually evaluated to ensure that they apply to current conditions and circumstances. The criteria used in this evaluation are not focused on risk avoidance and are not necessarily the same as those used in RIM programs.

The process is complicated by the evolutionary nature of knowledge assets. An existing knowledge asset's value may be enhanced with the development of a new knowledge asset. It is important to think about how the relationship between old and new will be determined and encapsulated in the system. The relationship between knowledge assets and the additional insights it generates are often where the real value lies -- in this instance one plus one often equals three.

Electronic documents are frequently used as the foundation of an organization's explicit knowledge base. These important intellectual assets are coupled with other knowledge that has been documented. The sum of both is then considered in conjunction with knowledge that remains undocumented (commonly referred to as tacit knowledge). The ability to assemble and leverage the combination of explicit and tacit knowledge offers an organization the extraordinary opportunity to develop sustainable competitive position.

In Conclusion

Both RIM and KM are fundamental to an organization's success. Although they have different areas of emphasis and focus, both capitalize on organizational memory. It is important for both groups of information professionals to appreciate the advantages offered by viewing RIM and KM through a single lens.

Many information management systems (people, processes, technology) in place today were designed to support the goals and objectives of a different business world -- to manage thousands of documents, not billions. Their design also does not recognize the real benefits possible from the combined forces of technology use and knowledge availability. For example, many of today's systems ignore the value of identifying and analyzing relationships between disparate information or knowledge elements.

To return to Michael Schrage: "... only the most superficial analysis would treat the WWW [World Wide Web] as the WLD -- the World's Largest Database. The reality is that it is a global network of thinkers and ideas and markets. Yes, new patterns of information flow enable new kinds of relationships. But new kinds of relationships demand new patterns, quality and content of information" (Schrage 1997). There is an absolute need to think of RIM and KM processes and systems in this way; only then is there a possibility that all information assets can be leveraged in a really creative way.

While some view knowledge management as the current business fad, knowledge is fundamental to the growth of both individuals and groups. When the development of knowledge as a business practice is hampered, funny things begin to happen. Contention between RIM and KM is unhealthy, it makes no positive contribution to developing the rich intellectual environment needed for success in the 21st Century.

We in the information management business are in a world that changes continuously; we must have the ability to change with it. We must constantly ask ourselves

* Why do we do this?

* What would happen if we didn't do this?

* Why do we do this in this way?

* What could we do differently that would improve the outcome?

* What are other people doing that we should consider?

Recognizing the important roles that knowledge plays as contributor to and product of the learning process is critical to building core capabilities that will be difficult for others to duplicate. Respecting the importance of legal and regulatory compliance is fundamental to long-term survival. A blend of the two disciplines, RIM and KM, appears to present a formidable and compelling success opportunity. We just need to do it.

REFERENCES

Balla, John, Lisa Matway, and Linda Andrews. "KM Spawns The Portal (And Some Other Interesting Gadgets)." e-doc. March/April 2000: 57.

Cary, Robert. "Ancient and Modern." e-doc. March/April 2000: 51.

Schneider, Dan. "Electronic Record Keeping -- Issues in Search of Answers." e-doc. March/April 2000: 47.

Schrage, Michael. "The Relationship Revolution: Understanding the Essence of the Digital Age." The Merrill Lynch Forum. March 1997: 8, 10.

Jan Duffy is vice president, 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]