Knowledge is really just information that is appropriate to a needed decision, process or context. It's not the provider that gives knowledge; it's the needy recipient that makes it out of the information that is available. "Knowledge" may simply be an awareness of facts - not the provider's awareness, but the recipient's.

 

 

Knowledge exists in an environment, not in a container.  In other words, knowledge is not a material - it's an effect. Knowledge users’ roam all over the business process environment doing spontaneous and therefore frequently unpredictable things. All too often IT tends to forget this key element in a business process – the user who is trying to find an effective way of understanding, managing and supporting human-driven processes. The fact is that the majority of business processes (some 85% according to the analyst company Forrester) have a requirement for knowledge and this involves this critical resource – people.  This is not human interaction that simply performs handling and form filling – this is decision making requiring appropriate knowledge.   Knowledge and Knowledge Management therefore requires careful attention and appropriate methods for its handling.

 

If knowledge is systematically managed, there will be clarity about what kind of value is being generated at the different points in the process of making, saving and delivering it, and users should be guided through it appropriately in real-time as they work.  The availability of the right knowledge in the right circumstance is a different problem from the delivery of at-large knowledge supplies.  Determining the "rightness" of the knowledge and of the circumstance is not about inherently "correct" content. Instead, it involves the use of frameworks that connect expertise to outcomes, not just requestors to information. The biggest practical challenge is to shape analysis and judgment during a task, by exposing enough knowledge to present, guide and validate choices.

 

If the users are to get what they need, the main perspective for managing knowledge has to do with context-sensitivity. To obtain repeatable, optimal, reliable context-sensitivity, the mechanics of managing knowledge have to take care of combining a knowledge "supply chain" capability with knowledge "value chain" capability.

 

There are various repositories that we think of as system sources in the “supply chain” - data, information and knowledge. It is important to handle the transformation of data first into information and then into knowledge. However, most users don't distinguish them from each other; they count on analysis to force transformations (i.e. "interpretations") from whatever repository they start with.

 

If we are really to manage knowledge then we need to understand the different roles of the repositories.  For example, what does a database contribute to knowledge transfer? Mainly a focus on (i.e. selection of facts according to) a defined subject. An information base emphasizes the ability to associate the data with the circumstantial need. A knowledge base on the other hand emphasizes the perspective of the user who is actually in that circumstance.

 

Knowledge Management's significance is that it establishes an environment in which individual workers can more readily achieve their performance objectives.  Knowledge Management entails what might be thought of as the embedding of a consultative capability (an environment) within the workflow of operations.