Individuals hold key to knowledge

Individuals hold key to knowledge2004-3-17 16:05:51 Waltraut Ritter/KMCenter Have you ever noticed that every person has his/her very own way of organizing information? Personal information management is a very private matter, and the way you organize your information universe, how you organize your work, what types of filing and retrieval systems you use, how you take notes and use email - all this is highly subjective and at the same time it reveals a lot about your personal productivity and working style. You perhaps use a PDA, one (or more) notebooks and an office desktop, in-trays, filing cabinets, pieces of paper, voicemail, and a whole range of other communication and storage media. The variety of tools that is available to organize knowledge work seems endless. However, all that technology has really compounded the problem of our work: an address, a to-do item, a document, a file I need could be on any one of those devices and there is little integration and communication between them. You may also have information in your jacket pocket - an important note, a business card - so how are you to feed this information into your system? Personal information is distributed among the infrastructure but few people would say they are able to manage it effectively and productively. Most people feel desperate about this. At times you make a major effort to reorganize your files, delete old data, improve your search techniques but end up feeling overloaded, disorganized and info-stressed. Why should organizations address how individuals manage their personal knowledge and information? At the organizational level, information system and architecture are often infinitely better than at the personal level because decades of practice and science have produced rational frameworks, best practices, and norms on how to treat information. The logic of organizing information and knowledge at the organizational level does not necessarily correspond with the logic at the level of the individual, which is why personal knowledge management becomes an organizational issue. No matter how good an organization‘s information is, if individuals can‘t find it, store it and use it, then it‘s of little value. Personal information effectiveness has become the limiting factor in information and knowledge management for most organizations. Thomas Davenport suggests that universities and even elementary and secondary schools should teach students how to better manage their personal information. Davenport asks: "After all, what knowledge is more valuable than how to find, organize and learn from the world‘s information?" We hardly get any introduction to organize the information universe we live in, or make productive use of information and knowledge in and around ourselves and it is surprising that even organizations don‘t address this issue. The increasing use of technology and software that help organizations to make better use of their resources (from CRM to portals, from SAP to Outlook, from content management to business intelligence) requires that everyone in an organisation using these systems knows and understands the logic and purpose to a certain extent. Corporate information structures and systems imply a way of organizing information. Typical examples of this are intranets and portals built on organization-wide taxonomy or structured vocabulary created for particular subject domains. There may be several sorts of taxonomy designed for different purposes, such as automatic indexing or intranet navigation. This is what I was referring to as the logic of information architectures. It is an interesting aspect of this logic that individuals often have a different logic and their information behaviour tends to be highly subjective, sometimes colliding with the rationality of an organization‘s information structure. In the early days of knowledge management it was a common assumption that we should capture and organize bits of "knowledge" in central databases, and turn individual knowledge into an organizational system. The people involved were relevant only as donors to the common ontology or as empty vessels into which information and knowledge could be poured. Few information and knowledge managers hold this belief today, but some still dream of a perfect, rational and efficient organization based on optimal information structures. We know that knowledge is messy, complex and subjective. Knowledge workers have the disturbing habit of being human, so they refuse to change their behavior or to contribute metadata into a shared pool. And universal taxonomies are worthless if divorced from the subjective experience of those who use or generate that information. What does this mean for information and knowledge professionals trying to improve the way an organization makes use of its information and knowledge? First of all, we should take individual subjectivity and priorities into account-keeping in perspective that people have different views and information patterns. Information management tends to focus on reducing the complexity of individual information patterns and creates rules and conventions for the organization of information, while knowledge management comes from a different angle, trying to build on existing information behavior patterns, nurturing existing collaboration, conversation streams, and relationships within organizations. It is about understanding the context of an organizational information environment, seeing the strengths and weaknesses of existing collaboration and knowledge sharing among people, and then looking at possibilities to increase the effectiveness of a knowledge-based organization with suitable IT applications. The emergence of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) acknowledges that we have to understand the individual situation of knowledge workers first, if we want to increase the productivity of an organization as a whole. PKM is defined as a diverse set of principles, concepts, disciplines and tools that we can all apply as knowledge workers to help improve our ability to meet our personal and business objectives and increase our productivity. It should be viewed as a set of problem-solving skills that will be required for successful knowledge work in the twenty-first century. PKM skills include: retrieving information; evaluating/assessing information; organizing information; analyzing information; presenting information; securing information; and collaborating around information, and most critically-making sense of information. Personal information and knowledge management enable and empower individual knowledge workers, but its real power lies in increasing the productivity of teams, groups, departments, communities and organizations. Every individual possesses a knowledge base that he or she uses to solve problems, create new ideas, perform tasks and make an impact on the environment. This knowledge base is unique to an individual and comprises a web of acquired information, distilled experience, skills, insights and ways of doing things. Through the practice of knowledge management, organizations want to harness the collective knowledge bases of their employees (the individuals), which involves the provision of the necessary tools, infrastructure and environment to facilitate the transfer and utilization of knowledge. However, the key to successful knowledge management is the individual and his ability to maintain and share his/her knowledge base in an era of rapid changes.