iKnow
The blogosphere today was ablaze with streaming news about the iPhone, Apple’s long awaited convergence of its revolutionary iPod and mobile phone technology. Today’s unveiling at the annual Macworld conference did not disappoint. From a technological standpoint it is a new revolution and will inflict a heavy blow to the likes of Microsoft, which just launched its own “iPod”, the Zune, as well as Yahoo, Rhapsody, and Napster who are looking to gain ground on iTunes’ market share by offering exclusive music downloads to mobile phones, which, prior to today, represented an alternative to the iPod.
The iPhone, however, represents a much larger revolution. Playing music and acting as a video player, chat room, photo lab, email client, web browser, and phone, it represents a technological convergence that will empower knowledge sharing in a unique and powerful way. You may be thinking that this is nothing new with the popular use of Treos, Sidekicks, and BlackBerrys, but the iPhone stands alone. When combined, its simple interface, large screen resolution, and powerful OS orchestrate seemingly separate applications into one seamless, mobile, intuitive, sensory tool for expression.
Because of the search technologies of today, the libraries of yesterday are at our fingertips. Now with the unique web-browning feature offered in the iPhone, which allows full sized web pages to be viewed and navigated with ease on its a small mobile interface, the world’s information has the potential to be at one’s figure tips at anytime from anywhere—flattening our world and our connection with it in a dramatic way.
The ability to find information is only one part of the knowledge-sphere. Information does not become knowledge until it is adopted or adapted. Adoption is rarely successful outside of the instructional realm, which includes technical and or encyclopedic information. Adaption is where the true economies of knowledge bring the returns in our ability to evolve and innovate. Yet, adapting posses much greater hurdles than adopting. Adapting requires the translation of information and ideas into a language that is practically unique to each individual. Adaption requires the recognition of patterns that create an adaptable story that fits one’s own paradigm; success requires the ability to communicate in multiple mediums to paint a picture that can be cast under different lights as circumstances warrant.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Cave drawings in ancient times were used to tell stories, today they continue to tell their stories and are relied upon to unveil the intricacies of the human dialogue from times long past. iPhone’s ability to bring picture text, sound , and even video to the dialogue’s of today go a long way to unveiling the stories behind the fury of information that is constantly inundating our ears and eyes.
Apple’s latest offering represents the birth of a new design mindset. The iPhone does not simply extend our accessibility and exposure to busy information, but rather it is a tool that extends our accessibility and exposure to stories. This makes the iPhone a launching pad to having not only information at one’s figure tips but knowledge as well.
Picasso by numbers
Knowledge Management (KM) represents an opportunity to incorporate the human element into performance management, something that has been sorely lacking in the exhaustive progression of management tools that have attempted to sterilize the human art of business into bytes of ones and zeros. Touted as the cure, each new tool begs the attention of heart broken executives on the rebound–from TQM to Six Sigma to Lean–when in reality, it’s just a repackaging of predecessors with a few new bells and whistles. The opportunity to incorporate the human element, however, will be spoiled by the misdirected resources and technologies being sunk into KM that threaten to define it as nothing more than an a demented Alex Trebek who seems to know everything and nothing at the same time.
In response to Bain & Company’s latest Management Tools and Trends survey, which reflected the responses of 960 global executives, Darrell Rigby, senior partner and founder of the survey, said that the results showed that “technology’s influence on management tools is maturing”. Rigby found that nine in ten executives felt that information technology created significant competitive advantages. Surely KM was one of the management tools on the mind of executives when expressing the significant impact of technology. Yet, the IT advantages seem elusive; while the survey reflected substantial gains in the usage of KM (now nearing 55%), its satisfaction score ranked near the bottom of the group (fourth lowest). If the disparity between use and satisfaction widens, as the trend seems to suggest, this critical management tool is likely to experience the same fate as the many forgotten tools littering the PI landscape.
For years companies have deployed KM technologies focused on building repositories of knowledge. These dumping grounds have proven difficult to populate primarily due to the unnatural activity of recording for others what one already knows. Bain & Company, for example, created a system in the late 1980s, asking consultants to write one-page summaries of their projects. Yet, after 20 years it was only able to achieve 40% compliance in this initiative. Not until Bain hired and unleashed 20 knowledge “brokers”, charged with the task of encouraging and aiding consultants to write summaries, did a user base begin to establish itself. Raytheon and Xerox have encountered similar hurdles trying to extricate knowledge from their technicians. Raytheon used knowledge “coaches” to help guide input from its technicians’ experiences. Xerox seeded their Eureka system with ideas from management and gave rewards to those technicians that submitted tips.
In an attempt to circumvent the resources required to “broker” knowledge, organizations rely upon technology (the genie in the bottle) to effectively cloud the complicated human issues in learning and teaching. Big players, like Microsoft, which is rumored to be adding “expertise location” as future feature in its office suite (utilizing contextual interpretation of documents and the interconnectivity between people to locate expertise) are poised to create obscure oracles. AskMe Corp. has been engaged by the Commerce Department to create an expertise database. To navigate around the human “broker”, AskMe “simply” asks end users to build a profile by uploading their resume, a list of frequently asked questions, and other documents. The final component of AskMe’s database is an interface that allows knowledge seekers to request information from a list of individuals the system has defined as experts. Furthermore, it records all interaction–further refining expertise based on the participation rate of knowledge providers.
I have no doubt that this approach has “allowed experts to flourish and shine” as the Commerce Department claims. But what does it really buy an organization if those who ultimately engage the knowledge provider, the knowledge seeker, lacks the judgment to distinguish a true expert within a sea of Alex Trebeks? What defines an “expert”? Is it someone who is passionate and prolific? Is it someone who has an impeccable resume?
There is a place for the current pursuits in building KM repositories, but we need to be careful in setting our expectations for the returns on the knowledge found within them. Xerox estimates its Eureka database, with over 70,000 suggestions, cuts costs by 10%, saving millions in repairs. Technical repositories like Eureka effectively use technologies to simplify and distill activities often too complex to fit in a standard set of instructions but are repeated, with variations, again and again. Instructional KM systems like Eureka often meet expectations because the technical knowledge they hold is bite size, contextual, and well defined, requiring less effort to adopt. For the most ardent users of KM, however, many interrelated factors are at play. From subject-area expertise to tactical organizational intelligence, this complex kaleidoscope of knowledge cannot be simply replicated onto the paint-by-number canvas which current technological pursuits provide.
The underlying misalignment between the huge investments in KM technology and their required return is that it is ultimately not about refined expert and knowledge search technologies, save instructional knowledge; it’s about translating the universe of ideas into the adaptable folk taxonomy of the knowledge seeker. The gap between use and usefulness of KM will not only remain but will likely widen as technological answers by Microsoft and others pander to the notion that knowledge only needs to be searchable and accessible to be useful. Latching onto these initial technological answers will only bring disappointment to management and delay progress until a new sexier rendition builds enough momentum to woo the broken hearts of executives once again.