Managing the threat of infoglut

Knowledge and other forms of 'intellectual capital' are the 'hidden

assets' of a company. They do not appear on the balance sheets in annual reports

of enterprises, yet they underpin value creation and future earnings potential.

Knowledge intensive companies, like Microsoft, have market value at atleast 10

times the value of their physical assets. They are realizing that to remain

competitive they must explicitly manage their intellectual resources and

capabilities. To achieve this, enterprises have initiated a range of knowledge

management(KM) projects and programs.

Industry experts opine that the primary focus of these projects have been on

developing new applications of information technology to support the digital

capture, storage, retrieval and distribution of an organization's explicitly

documented knowledge. A few of them on the other hand, believe that the most

valuable knowledge is the tacit knowledge that the workforce has gained by

experience, by sharing via interpersonal interaction or social relationships.

Says, Infosys Technologies, Principal Knowledge Manager Dr.Kochikar, "

The availability of technologies for better knowledge sharing in recent years

has spurred the practice of KM further. Apart from the technology dimension, the

three other broad dimensions along with which a KM effort needs to be focused

are culture, content and process".

Further, he says, " The content dimension refers to defining the types

of content in which the knowledge to be shared is embodied and the mechanisms

involved in organizing and structuring that content that facilitates sharing.

The process aspect refers to the gamut of processes that need to be defined for

improved knowledge sharing. The most important dimension - culture - addresses

the issue of convincing people about the benefits of sharing and making sharing

a part of an organizations routine work."

Besides, industry segments differ in terms of the profiles of employees,

nature of customer relationships, demographics, legal and regulatory

environments, the basic revenue model, etc. An organization's unique business

and cultural context is an aggregate of these factors and the specific

architecture used for KM needs to be specific to that context.

Agrees, QAI India, Sr. Consultant for knowledge management, T A Rajgopal,

"The strategies for adopting KM are completely different from one another.

For the same industry segment the way in which KM solutions are designed would

be different enterprises because KM system is purely localized to a specific

environment. Hence there cannot be a KM system that can be applied to all

scenarios. One environment might require codification approach while the other

might require personalization approach. One case might want to have a push

technology for their KM system, while the other might want to have a pull

technology and so on.

But why KM strategy?

Feels Agnitio Management Systems, CEO, Zulfikar Deen, " The information

revolution is fueling economic expansion and throwing open a world of

opportunities. At the same time, enterprises are encountering unprecedented

challenges and one of the biggest challenges is information overload".

Information overload or infoglut has been a problem for years, but with the

advent of the Internet and e-business, it is accelerated. Employees have more

data to deal with and it comes to them from a wide range of categories and

sources: email and faxes, spreadsheets and presentations, browsers and

applications, Web sites and data warehouses.

Besides, most of the enterprises use the services of a consulting firm for

their various enterprise process, right from

system installation to managing their business processes. Once the processes are

up and running, these firms disengage, leaving the enterprises to manage on

their own but while leaving so, they take along invaluable knowledge with them.

Enterprises without strong SLAs and good KM strategies face several

significant challenges, such as:

§ Risk of service interruption to

employees, customers and suppliers in the event of system failure

§ In case of disruptions caused by

business and work process changes, quality of customer service can be hit

because of lack of sufficient support knowledge.

§ Inability to respond quickly to

external challenges such as changes in competitive strategy by competitors or

changes in customer buying patterns and internal developments or to protect

against infringement of copyright legalities.

§ Ongoing overhead costs resulting

from reliance upon external consultants to maintain and upgrade system and

applications.

Thus, managing information overload and streamlining business processes is

one of the critical success factors that is making knowledge management vital to

the e-enterprises. For this reason, a

viable KM strategy is required to enhance the core competency and utilize it to

its competitive advantage.

Common strategies are based around faster-time-to-market, improved customer

service and higher productivity through better sharing of best practices. A key

factor in every case is that core knowledge, such as customer knowledge, is

actively managed so that it flows easily from those who generate it to those who

need it.

A good knowledge management strategy involves efficient frameworks, right

tools and techniques and adopting best practices. One needs to make better use

of the knowledge that already exists within the firm, but is not known or is

inaccessible. This calls for greater interaction between the employees referred

to as social capitol. The other focussed strategies is that of innovation, the

creation of new knowledge and turning ideas into valuable products and services.

This is sometimes referred to as knowledge innovation.