Information Assets and Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management? Is it real can we achieve delivery of this great mythical statement. Well I believe that it can be achieved through effective and coherent information management. Here goes the theory; Knowledge is tacit, it is shared and generally created either through personal or shared insight and is based on the use of, and / or, the creation of information. Information is data that has meaning and context.

Knowledge has a half life. Now the time of the half life I cannot express in numbers only in words. The length of Knowledge's half life is reduced as the number of people grow where the base information used has no control or validity.

For example if I send a document (information) to one other person via e-mail. We may create insight based on our communication and collaboration. But I then send that same document (uncontrolled) to another person the value of knowledge decreases, as the information is now loosing context based on its loose distribution.

The distribution of information in an uncontrolled fashion is like the game of Chinese whispers where the original meaning gets warped through the filters of the mind as it is passed from one person to another, without reference to the original source. Of course on the electronic world there is the added problem that the the original information is now in multiple copies spread across e-mail in boxes, and doused across multiple file servers.

What we really need to do is to capture the knowledge as "information" so we can provide consistency to the conversations and raise the value of the information assets. Knowledge is useful as long as people retain it and use it. But collectively it is more useful if I am able to distill the knowledge into useful information that increases the value of my information bases.

In the translation from knowledge to a more explicit state of information there is always a loss, as you cannot capture the pure insight from the mind. But even if we assume that we loose half of the knowledge acquired, we should be able to raise the overall information asset base by a factor "x" above what is was before.

So good information management is a key to the creation of knowledge and is essential to the ability to capture new insight at a value that increases the overall information asset base.

To get to the place where we can raise the level of Knowledge throughout organisation, we must first get a view that information is a key asset that needs to be managed.

You need to manage the information that is feeding into and being created by the Knowledge processes across the organisation. This is where PEOPLE interact with content in the MANAGE, PROCESS and DELIVER part of the ECM model. By getting controls in place we are able to capture and transform knowledge to information and retain its value so we can add to the overall information asset base of the organisation.