DID YOU KNOW THAT?
Yes, But What Does Know Mean?
The road to knowledge management, now well-traveled, seems to end with the science of acquiring and retrieving data. The end of that road, which was built mostly by the brilliance of computer scientists, stops where a clear understanding of the meaning of useful knowledge begins.
Managing knowledge is key to many aspects of a practice, beginning, perhaps, with internal communications.
But with the growth of knowledge management as a discipline in many aspects of professional practice, some definitions may help forge a new direction for knowledge management that not only move the subject to a new realm of discovery, but may help find ways to make knowledge more useful as a management tool.
What Is Information?
First we know that data is not information, and information is not knowledge. Data, we know, are basic facts – unalloyed, with little or no value outside their own existence. To say, for example, that a tree is a tree merely defines that object. It says nothing of it’s structure, its purpose, its value. It tells us nothing about forests or forestry, or uses of its leaves or trunk. That a tree is a tree is data, not information.
Information is when we integrate the existence of a tree with the existence of, say, furniture. Then the facts of a tree take on a new meaning.
Knowledge is when we take the information about the tree and the furniture and use it to inform either forestry or furniture manufacture. Knowledge management is when we when we codify knowledge and convert it to useful information.
What Is Knowledge?
Theoretically, knowledge may be defined as information that is now, or may in the future, be useful in a specific context. Knowledge may also be abstract, with no immediate use or application, in which case it may serve as a foundation for an ultimate use. For example, when the laser was discovered in the AT&T labs a few decades ago, it was merely a scientific phenomenon, with no apparent practical use. The uses emerged and were developed much later.
In a business context, knowledge is information that can be applied for a specific and useful business purpose. For example, the demographics of a particular market area is raw data. Analyzing that data in terms of the ability to make decisions about serving that area is information. Knowing how to apply that information to make those decisions is knowledge. Knowing how to deliver knowledge to those who can use it most effectively to meet a specific objective is knowledge management.
Knowledge – cognition – in this context, has specific properties that must be understood if the subject is to have any practical value.
· Knowledge is dynamic. It’s value and quality change constantly. An illustration of dynamic information is an address in space.
For example, if someone asks where you live, the answer can be defined as a fixed position, say the corner of X and Y. That is a constant static point that was there yesterday, is here today, and is most likely to be here tomorrow.
But if you ask for the address of a body in outer space, the answer is, in relation to what? Objects in space are in constant motion, and are located in relation to other objects in motion. This is dynamic motion. Knowledge is, in the same way, dynamic.
Even with the common language needed for communication, we know that this dynamic must be recognized if knowledge is to be useful. Knowledge is subject to…
o Changing sources of input
o Changing input from the same sources
o Changes precipitated by the use of knowledge
o Changing needs for the same information or data
· Knowledge is cumulative. Nothing is often known by just one person—nor is it ever known in entirety. For example, what bits of knowledge did the Wright brothers bring together to make an airplane? Or Edison, Bell, or Morse, for their inventions?
The same knowledge can serve different purposes. For example, an area’s demographics may help the marketing department define the nature of a product. That same demographic information may help the finance department determine the cost of serving that market for.
· People process information differently. Each person receives information through a screen of personal experience and prior knowledge. Give two people the same information about a company and its investment potential, for example, and one will choose to buy the stock and the other to sell it.
· Another form of knowledge is tacit knowledge – what we know only intuitively, but can’t test pragmatically. For example, Freud’s view of infant perception and psychology could only be surmised, but not tested. But if we build a system predicated on that intuition, and the system works, then we may assume that the intuition may be valid.
· Merely accessing knowledge can changes the nature and value of that knowledge. For example, accessing information about a company’s stock can change the value of that information, both in the way it’s perceived and in the way it’s acted upon. Another example is in the botanical Raowolfia, whose medicinal properties were known by researchers in India and reported in Indian scientific journals, but unknown abroad. When it was discovered by drug companies in the United States, Raowolfia became the foundation for the pharmaceutical Reserpine.
The practical application of these concepts is a function of context. Knowledge of itself is one thing to a philosopher, another to a scientist, another to an artist or writer or journalist, and another to a functioning business person or professional.
Cognition for cognition’s sake is a fine abstraction and academic exercise, like any pure science. Cognition to serve a process is a different science, although the two need not be mutually exclusive. But the danger of analyzing and philosophizing beyond usefulness can dilute the currency of the information.
We are concerned here with the use of knowledge in a business context – gathering, formulating and applying knowledge to the uses of managing a company or professional firm, and using knowledge competitively.
Clearly understood, a system of making knowledge useful in a business context, based on the principles described here, can be developed successfully.