KM 3.0 Part II: The value of knowledge

Introduction

From chapter I: What is knowledge:
"Expertise acquired by a person through experience or education"

Has this knowledge any value if it is not used by anyone ? Does the value increase or decrease when we share it with others ? And what kind of knowledge should be shared with others to help people get their job done ?

This depends on several factors, the most important being
- Value (worth vs. cost)
- Scope (e.g., organization, department, project, personal)
- Expiration time (short vs. long term, static vs. dynamic)

Collecting and sharing knowledge will also affect
- initial cost
- maintenance cost
- information overload
- findability/searchability

If you want to collect knowledge from a project, someone needs to write down the knowledge in a format that is understandable, and in a place that is searchable/findable. This will take some time, and therefore has an initial cost (e.g., 3 hours at $50 an hour = $150).

If the knowledge contains data that changes over time (and most do), you also need to update and maintain the knowledge (if not it will lose its value). Knowledge with a short expiration date (like today's lunch menu) will have a higher maintenance cost as it needs to be updated often.

Collecting everything will lead to information overload and make it more difficult to search for and find what you need, and may actually decrease the overall value of the captured knowledge. If 30% of your knowledge database is useful to 2% of your employees, then the other 98% of your people will have to filter through a lot of irrelevant information unnecessary.
Having four main documents makes it easy to find what you're looking for. If you add 10-15 more documents, it will be more difficult to find what you want if you don't have a system for organizing them. And once you've got hundreds of documents, you will probably not even try to find the document you're looking for.

Value - Scope - Expiration time

(Subjective) value: What I need is not necessarily what you need. What we need as individuals is not necessarily what the organization needs. e.g., listing the daily lunch menu may be considered very valuable by the employees, and may also increase interest for using the intranet, even if it isn't valuable for the organization directly. Making their job easier / more pleasant can indirectly help them get their job done !

Useless vs. nice-to-know vs. critical knowledge: All knowledge is not equal. Critical knowledge for some may be useless knowledge for others. Collecting lots of useless knowledge is a waste of time (and money), and only increases the information overload. Sharing critical knowledge (for you) with someone who doesn't need or want it is also useless.

Worth vs. cost: Researching, collecting/learning, maintaining and sharing knowledge have a cost. Even if the knowledge is worth a lot, the cost may be higher (giving negative value). In addition to this, if the knowledge is costly to keep up-to-date, the value will decrease over time and may not be worth it in the long run.

Quality vs. quantity: In the age of information overload, "the more the better" is not the goal. Higher quantity means more difficulty organizing, maintaining and finding useful knowledge.

Context: Most knowledge is only valuable in certain contexts, and often only in combination with some personal tacit knowledge. e.g., a summary of programming languages is useless without a programming background, and a summary of the latest accounting practices is useless without an economics background.

Scope: How many is the knowledge useful to, and at which level (personal / project / department / company etc) ?

- if only useful to you, do not share

- if useful to you and one coworker, share directly (face-to-face, phone, email etc)

- if useful to several people - collect and share (better, easier and more efficient than face-to-face with 15 people)

If useful to several people in a project you are working on, share with them (not the marketing department). If useful to several people in the marketing department, share with them (not a project). Best practices/procedures often used in a department should be shared within the department (not necessarily the organization).

Avoid "noise" and information overload by only sharing knowledge with people that would find it useful !

Expiration time: Knowledge is an asset, and will often depreciate like other assets. However, unlike physical assets, knowledge may be updated and maintained to avoid reduction of the value due to passage of time.

The knowledge may be valid short or long term, and may be static or dynamic. Short term knowledge is quickly obsolete, and dynamic knowledge needs to be maintained to be valid long term. For example, dynamic short term knowledge may be too expensive to update and maintain compared to its value.

(click graphs for large version)

The first graph illustrates the relationship between scope, expiration time and the value of knowledge. The scope is indicated both by color and size. The color shows whether the knowledge is relevant to you, a project, a department or the organization. The size indicates the number of people it is relevant to.

In this example, the blue dots are for organization-wide knowledge. Not too much knowledge is relevant for the whole organization (only 2 dots), but it affects a lot of people (big dots). The black dots are for personal knowledge. There are many small dots as they only affect you. The brown dots are for project-specific knowledge. They have a short expiration time (located to the left) and affects a limited number of people (medium size) but often have high value (at the top).

The second graph illustrates that the value of knowledge is not constant. The graph shows some examples of how different maintenance cost influences the value over time. Most knowledge lose relevance and value over time, but updating and maintaining it may keep it valuable for a longer period of time.

For example, the latest sports results must be updated daily or hourly, while the capitals of the countries in the world is very static. Maintaining the sports results is a lot of work, while the list of capitals is very easy to maintain. But, if you're a sports journalist, you really don't need a list of capital cities anyway, so even if it is "cheap" to create it is only contributing to information overload without adding any value.

The amount of details will influence the value and maintenance cost and can be adjusted depending on your needs.

For example, a list of employees and their education is long term static knowledge with medium/large scope.
- if you add phone number/e-mail the value will increase, but possibly also the maintenance cost (whenever internal phone numbers change)
- if you add their current projects the value may increase, but the knowledge becomes more dynamic, and therefore increases the maintenance cost
- if you add their current expertise you can get an indirect explicit version of their tacit knowledge - you cannot easily transfer your tacit knowledge, but you can inform others that you have it, and thereby transfer it face-to-face if needed. Maintenance cost increases, but the value may potentially increase more.

Listing the projects in a department is medium/long term static with medium scope and low maintenance (and low value)
- adding a list of the members in each project adds value with low increased cost and maintenance
- adding results and "lessons learned" to completed projects may add a lot of value for a small one-time maintenance cost (when completed)
- updating the status for each project daily/weekly/monthly adds value, but also increases maintenance cost

In each case you should evaluate if the increased value is higher than the increased initial/maintenance cost. If not, the knowledge may not be worth collecting and sharing at all !

Summary

Looking at factors like value, scope and expiration date, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the "collect everything" mentality of KM 1.0 was a failure.

Adding factors like maintenance cost and information overload, it shouldn't be very surprising that the "share everything" mentality of KM 2.0 is risking failure as well.

We cannot treat knowledge as one thing, but rather as a diverse range of subjects which can be useful to someone in some situations.

How do you determine which knowledge to keep and share ("I ACE")
- Identify what knowledge the employees need to get their job done
- Analyze the value, scope and expiration date for each knowledge item
- Collect and share the most valuable (worth vs. cost) knowledge first
- Explore the best (easiest, most efficient, most useful) way to collect and share each item (depending on scope)

The philosophy of KM 3.0 is focused on the individual, and the use of knowledge. You want to collect and share valuable knowledge to help people get their job done.

Part III: The KM process