Information Technology Knowledge Management & Human Civilizations

As human beings, one difference between us and others of the animal kingdom is that we document our knowledge, experiences, imaginations, re-usable patterns, and thoughts.  We do not just depend on our DNA to pass down what we know and who we are to the next generation.  With the documentation of our knowledge and experiences, we have achieved significant and powerful advantages over our competition over the course of our existence.

In today’s modern organizations, I venture to say, less than 5% of the people in any given organization have comprehensive knowledge of how the organization functions. While having more than 5% of an organization’s people with such comprehensive knowledge is not necessary most of the time, having that knowledge in a secure and controlled way that can be reviewed and re-used can be the difference between what makes one organization survive and another vanish.

Most of us cannot think on our feet without having some sort of knowledge of the topic or at least the ability to obtain knowledge in a short order to address the problem. Up until modern computing came along, there was no an easy way to store centrally or share easily the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last few thousands of years.

Even though we have developed and are continuing to improve the computing processes needed to put such knowledge management systems together, we are not doing a very good job documenting what we know on a day-to-day basis.  An organization’s knowledge is retained or lost with 5% of the people who work there. If an organization loses enough of the 5% of people with comprehensive knowledge, it ceases to exist.

There are many areas of knowledge in our society that are worth managing, but we are going to briefly cover the area of Information Technology in this document.

Information Technology (IT) processes are by far the least documented field of knowledge despite all the progresses we have made in the area, partly because it is still a relatively new field, and partly because it is changing so fast and is so complex that to document the knowledge correctly becomes exceedingly difficult.  In addition, we as IT professionals are not making a concerted effort and to a great extend do not even know the best, most effective way to go about this documentation. Most IT professionals would probably not like to confess their agreement to my last point.

The main issue I see here is the lack of understanding of the importance of documented knowledge and being able to re-use this knowledge to save time and resources in the long term. My single rule for knowledge management over the years has been that if this is something I need to do more than once, I document it into a re-usable pattern such as a template, a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), or other type of document so that I do not need to waste my time and energy on it again the next time I need to perform the same task.  Our organization has been built over the years on this very principal, so that even as our associates come and go, the know-how and methods needed to provide high-quality services remain with the organization. While we have worked hard on this for the last 15 years, the entire system is still a work-in-progress, and it will forever be a work-in-progress or as I like to call, a live system.

So, the question is how to keep the knowledge management system alive and current, so that it is easy to use and so the knowledge within it and the management of this knowledge become part of the organization’s DNA. Even after 15 years working on this task, we have still not achieved this goal. There are many obstacles to building a live knowledge management system.

An ideal system would be one that people working within the organization do not even know they are using, one which is part of their daily routines and decision-making processes. But most people would immediate say that this is impossible, and at the present time they are right. I hope in the future this will not be so. One day, someone will create a knowledge management system that will work intuitively and effectively within our daily routines and decision making processes.

There have been many efforts in the past to do so, and at present, people are still trying to make such a knowledge management a reality. We call these systems expert systems, decision making systems, management information systems, and so on. They are all going in the right direction, but the devil is always in the details. Many computing advancements will also be necessary for these systems to work and to become pervasive.  However, this does not mean that we can just stop thinking about it and wait for someone to hand us a perfect system. I do not believe a perfect system or even nearly perfect will come in our generation.

That is not to say the knowledge management system will replace the human intelligence and wisdom.  Below is the data flow diagram needed to reach human wisdom:

Data Flow Diagram For Human Wisdom

With today’s computing technology, especially with the ongoing advancements in Internet technologies and other related areas, we can at least begin to build a functioning live knowledge management system. The way we see it, the framework upon which knowledge management systems are based is fairly simple. In a typical cycle of accumulating knowledge, we go through the following high-level steps of the Knowledge Management Framework™ developed by Triware Networld Systems:

Software that we use daily should really have a common and open Application Programming Interface (API) to allow the embedding of knowledge workers' daily routines and practices into a data repository. Artificial Intelligent can be added through a separate set of APIs to take advantage of the gained knowledge.  By doing so, this live knowledge management system can be self-maintained by all the knowledge workers, through their day-to-day operations and decision making processes.

By Benson Yeung, Senior Partner

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