How does knowledge arise? How
can the enterprise encourage its growth, its storage, and its re-use?
Within an organization, mandate from the top down doesn’t necessarily
inspire the creation of knowledge from the bottom up, as one story from
technology’s history shows.
“PwC had invested tens of millions in developing a
‘worldwide body of knowledge’ in the form of standards, templates,
project documents, etc. Trouble is, it was out of date when it was
released, hardly anybody posted anything to it and it got progressively
more out of date. Think of it as a knowledge land-fill.” Comment to the post Manage Knowledgement
Collaboration between teams, departments, and
individuals within the enterprise is a growing business goal.
Enterprise-wide integration throughout the computing environment is the
current IT lodestone, and it delivers the infrastructure for two huge
benefits: collaboration, and resource sharing. Within this scenario,
the sharing of “known” knowledge, and the discovery and subsequent
propagation of “unknown” knowledge can occur.
Technical integration allows for an exciting new way to handle support issues and events, recently discussed by the Consortium for Service Innovation, namely the clustering of resources
at need from all parts of the enterprise, to the nexus of the issue,
for the time required to deploy the solution. This approach affords
great savings in cost.
Similarly, collaboration in the
knowledge economy requires integrated infrastructure, and in return
delivers continually evolving fresh knowledge and thus business
agility. Business agility – the ability to respond rapidly and
accurately to new circumstance, whether threat or opportunity – is now
a survival requirement for the enterprise, and this spurs attention on
knowledge, and provides incentive for experimentation in the ways of
synergy.
Investment continues in knowledge management and
business intelligence. Collaboration is seen as the magic glue that
allows the bottom-up discoveries to enter the higher-realm processing
and storage systems.
“Instant messaging is central to the
business-intelligence industry’s collaboration road map [...] expect to
see such interactive Web 2.0 technologies as AJAX,
blogs and wikis revolutionize the business intelligence experience.
Many vendors realize that decision support environments should let
users access intelligence wherever it may reside, be it in data
warehouses or in the heads of remote colleagues.” Business Intelligence Gets Collaborative
Debates arise around the nature of collaboration,
and knowledge cultivation. Is a blog a knowledge-management tool? A
collaboration tool? Both?
“Blogs are conversations. As you link with other people’s material, add their blogs to your RSS
feed; a community forms. The conversation is asynchronous, but that is
also true of most collaboration environments. In effect a blog is far
more of a conversation than many a community of practice in that it
opens to a wider network, the conversations are less controllable and
you are as likely (if not more likely) to be challenged. Ego in a blog
finds its own punishment as in any other environment.” Hubert’s error
Traditional notions of hierarchy and
administrative control are being challenged and overturned as newer
software paradigms of looser coupling between tightly defined services
find their echoes in management theory.
“Service-orientation contrasts with the typical
experience of changing monolithic applications where a change is likely
to cause a ripple effect throughout the application stack. Processes
associated with service-orientation support a much more iterative
approach to defining these services thanks to the increased level of
service independence [...] When business services are defined in this
way, one can decouple the business from the automation of the
business.” Business Rules in SOA:Decision Services and the Centralization of Rules Management
Knowledge too can often be broken down into more
granular parts, and stored in a database for more efficient and
targeted retrieval, and to create a different document, or to present a
different view.
“Content components represent a single topic, concept
or asset (e.g., image, table). They are assembled into multiple content
assemblies (content types) and can be viewed as components or as
traditional ‘documents’. Each component has its own life cycle (owner,
version, approval, use) and can be tracked individually or as part of
an assembly [...] For background, the component management approach
uses granular ‘building blocks’ to assemble customer-centric
information. Typically, the components are managed as XML
and can easily be re-assembled on-demand based on business rules and
the requirements of the content consumer. This approach allows
organizations to deliver the right information (personalized by role or
interest area), to the right people, at the right time, in the right
language, and in the right format.” Analyst Reports on ECM Don’t Tell The Whole Story – Why You Should Research What’s Not Said
Throughout this whole puzzle that challenges the
modern enterprise, and threaded through all its pieces and parts, is a
lot of software. All of it is concerned with knowledge, in all its many
facets, each facet with a software task: gathering, processing,
organizing, protecting, redistributing, recompiling, amending,
addending, deleting, updating, annotating, sharing, broadcasting, and –
somehow – making sense of.
