Yesterday, quoting Denis Pombriant, we described
how today’s methods of doing business through email are far in advance
of most organizations’ abilities to organize the information being
transferred. Not that email is advanced, more that it’s outdated in an
age progressing rapidly with technologies of collaboration.
As we have said before, Email is Buried Treasure, waiting to be unearthed, and polished, and valued.
The
vast depository of unstructured information in any large enterprise
represents a wealth of knowledge that should be mined, and codified for
retrievability.
Knowledge is what matters now – and always
did, else why communicate in the first place? The great value of
Enterprise 2.0, deriving from the technologies and examples of Web 2.0,
lies in using the database as repository for all information, separated
from its media of transfer and consumption.
While we as
users focus on the synergies of collaboration, the data generated at
every turn is being codified on the fly, for perpetual subsequent
re-use. The power of this, as Dennis Pombriant says in his article,
lies in absolute consensus:
“More than simply providing a central repository for
all of this information, the knowledgebase provides the checks and
balances needed to maintain a single version of the truth. There can
only be one current corporate presentation, for example, and it serves
no one if a sales representative must compare multiple ones to figure
out which is right – that’s the power of a repository.” – Sales Effectiveness Through Knowledge
The knowledgebase is the central store of what we unabashedly call wealth: the codified sum of knowledge of any organization. Much more knowledge exists than is codified of course: tacit knowledge exists as a tantalizing potential to be distilled from knowledge workers by clever software acting usually in real time.
The
great opportunity for IT in this time is to implement systems of
communication and collaboration that are compelling and liberating
enough in their own right that the organization’s users choose them by
preference, rather than going outside the firewall or governance.
At the same time, all these systems need to operate on standards compliant with the knowledge management systems. All the data needs to be integrated, and all of it should come under IT’s management. Open standards such as XML are the obvious example of how to develop for future integration.
The
transition from email to collaboration systems will not be easy: we
have a huge investment in our email clients, holding sometimes a decade
of information. And having to switch into a different application needs
to become a completely seamless operation. Browsers themselves need a
lot more interface development. But the alternative is madness. We’re
already fragmented in our working lives by different sources of
information, running on different protocols, as First Monday reports:
“Mid-size and large organizations employing knowledge
workers are greatly impacted by the Infomania phenomenon, also referred
to as Information Overload or Attention Deficit Trait (ADT). Infomania
is the mental state of continuous stress and distraction caused by the
combination of queued messaging overload and incessant interruptions.
“On average, knowledge workers can expect three
minutes of uninterrupted work on any task before being interrupted.
Sources of interruption include email, instant messages, phone calls,
text messages, co-workers, and other distractions. The majority of
these distractions are attended to immediately. The result is that
people average 11 minutes on any one ‘working sphere’ (project) before
switching to another project altogether.” – Infomania: why we can’t afford to ignore it any longer
