Quelle: Darwin, USA
I'M FRESH BACK at work after a five-month hiatus, and the first thingI did was zap about a zillion e-mail messages from my inbox.
Before I'd left the office at the end of April, I vowed to check mye-mail regularly. However, my resolve lasted about two weeks. I felt atwinge of guilt and that was it. People at work, I figured, knew howto reach me by phone and would call with anything of utmostimportance. And besides, a vow doesn't count until you say it out loudto someone.
Over the course of my leave, I was able to stay in the loop in termsof the big picture (i.e., that I still would have a job to come backto), but specifics escaped me. Undoubtedly, there were interestingthings happening that I would have wanted to know about, but I wasable to let them go.
That decision to let go was helped by certain technical difficultiesbeyond my control. In addition to the tortoise-like pace of readinge-mail messages in dial-up, something funky happened to my Internetaccess. I couldn't get to any bookmarked sites through Exploreranymore. Since I didn't feel like typing URLs into the AOL browser, Ifound I'd cut myself off from a good chunk of where I get informationduring my day on the job.
Well, now I'm back and trying to sort out what's useful - things I cancan spin into a story idea or pass along to someone else - from whatisn't. And it struck me: In its most rudimentary form, my inbox reviewis a kind of knowledge management system. I sift through materiallooking for snippets of relevance that I can turn into some kind ofuseful information for myself or colleagues.
Companies and organizations that utilize Knowledge Management aredoing much the same thing, albeit on a larger and more sophisticatedscale. They collect tons of data, review it, process it, disseminateit, all in the name of making smarter decisions about products,customers and markets. What companies don't want to do is slow to atrickle the amount of information they take in. Indeed, with all thetechnologies now available to collect and massage data, the emphasisamong many KM circles is to cast as wide a corporate information netas possible. The more information, the argument goes, the better theknowledge.
That's the conventional wisdom. But my self-imposed exile from datadeluge suggests to me that turning down the siphon every once in awhile will not result in a drought of knowledge. On the contrary,reduce the noise level, and the result is a better ear for whatmatters and what's important.
Having been out of the mainstream for nearly half a year, I find thatinformation that is inherently interesting and not just the latestbuzz seems to effortlessly leap out at me. Give me a couple of monthson the job, and I'll have to work harder at finding the good stuff.That's the effect of too much data over the long haul - it erodes oursense of what's cool and neat because we're overloaded.
The same can be said for organizational KM. Keep taking in ever moredata, and it becomes harder to turn it into knowledge. While companiescan't unplug for months at a time, KM efforts can take a short detour.Begin by asking different questions or looking for answers indifferent places. Instead of analyzing the same sales data, look atwhich industries are hiring or take a look at recent patent filings ofcompetitors.
Sometimes the best way to manage knowledge is to start with a cleanerslate.