You Don't Know Jack: The Titanic, Deck Chairs, and Knowledge Management

According to Wikipedia the definition of knowledge management (KM) is as follows:

[KM] comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizational processes or practice.

The foundation for KM has been laid in the early 1990s as the market has seen more value in what an organization knows, than what they create. KM has thus been garnering more and more attention from management academics and corporations ever since.
There are generally two types of knowledge within an organization: tacit and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is the type of knowledge which is hard to pass one, the internal store of information which make it nearly impossible to become a great master of an art without studying beneath one for years. Explicit knowledge pertains to all of the information which can be written down and expressed easily through communication, i.e. the location of Arizona.


In a similar vein, it is important not only to capture information, but to know the location of your knowledge. In large organizations (or even smaller ones) there can be many cracks through which vital information seeps, such as a departing employee or infrastructure failures. What companies should look for is a solution which enables employees to find what they are looking for so that they can do their jobs.


To enable this to happen, there must be a function of enterprise-wide search throughout the company, since relevant documents can be anywhere in a growing era of mobility (think about your iPad, iTouch, blackberry, laptop, home computer, file servers and work desktop). Without the ability to search through anywhere they store data, the ability for employees to access the store of knowledge which the company has built will be limited. And what's the point of knowing something if you can't use it?


Many of the best companies know this, and as Wikipedia says:

Organizations and business decision makers spend a great deal of resources and make significant investments in the latest technology, systems and infrastructure to support knowledge management. It is imperative that these investments are validated properly, made wisely and that the most appropriate technologies and software tools are selected or combined to facilitate knowledge management.

The challenge in enterprise-wide search is the ability to return results in time. Many solutions take weeks or time-out when searching, especially through email (because of the mailbox oriented design of many companies). ZL Unified Archive's competitive advantage is its search speed, in once instance it has searched through over 3 billion documents in a global deployment in a little over 1 minute and continues to do so to this day. In choosing a solution, and making sure it is "validated properly" I'd challenge someone to do it faster, more precisely and on such a scale.


The other challenge of KM, is the ability to turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. Personally, I follow the iceberg model. Most of a corporation's knowledge lays underwater as tacit knowledge. However, large corporations need to make this as explicit as possible, and an effective enterprise content management system is the first step in doing this. Without the ability to capture what you know, you will never learn. If you stop learning, you're dead in the water. And you don't want to be rearranging chairs on your corporate Titanic in these waters.