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Friday, July 25, 2008

What is really Knowledge Management?
Crossing the Chasm of Hype
by Dr. Yogesh Malhotra, BRINT Institute, www.yogeshmalhotra.com

Inc. Technology (#3, 1999). Dr. Yogesh Malhotra of @Brint.com was also interviewed and cited in this Inc. Technology article by the author.

It is much beyond "knowing what you know and then profit from it" as highlighted in the Inc. Technology special issue #3, 1999. Simply put, it may be stated as: "obsoleting what you know before others obsolete it and profit by creating the challenges and opportunities others haven't even thought about" as learnt over the last 5 Internet years.

It means a number of things that go against the grain of most simplistic statements and assumptions articulated by several authors, 'gurus', and company executives. This relates to the diversity of perspectives from which one can comprehend the concept of 'knowledge' and problems with the generally known definitions of 'management' that have filled many mainstream business texts.

In simple terms, it means:

• Relying primarily on information technologies for taking care of the company's competitive advantage won't cut it any more,

• Nor would relying upon people the way they have been trained in the existing educational, organizational and business models.

Why, you ask! Simply speaking, the business world has moved to a level when 'right answers' in one time and context can become wrong solutions in another time and context. Similarly, 'best practices' unless they are repeatedly analyzed for their sensibility may become 'worst practices' that may disastrously impede business performance and competence. The success of the company that created Britannica Encyclopedia doesn't ensure its success as the creator of MS-Encarta CD-ROM. Nor is the success of a company's creation of MS-Encarta CD-ROM ensured as its creator of an online directory such as Yahoo. In other words, the logic of success for yesterday doesn't translate automatically into the logic of success for the new tomorrow. The Pet Rock, the White Power Rangers, the Beanie Babies and the Furbies were toys that achieved success in different years without coming from the rule-book or the experience database of any single company. Despite their yesterday's success, the producers of such toys are not guaranteed a place in the future that doesn't compute based on yesterday's historical data.

On the technological side, the emphasis has been on creating more and more intelligent machines and programming the wazoo to the last detail assuming that greater detail of definition can define a more precise and accurate programming logic that can give you most accurate decisions resulting in most accurate action that would result in best performance. Correct? Nooo!! Wrong!!

The problems with almost all kinds of programs are that they cannot question their own underlying logic and related assumptions and nor can they sense dynamic changes occurring in the business environment that they have not been programmed by humans to detect in advance. In other words, faced with a future that is increasingly difficult to predict based upon past data, such programs relying upon memories of past data, fall out of whack despite their very impressive number crunching capabilities.

What is the solution, you ask? Well, good old common sense... However, some wise person had once remarked: "Common sense is very uncommon." And another one once said: "The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do." Kids, who are often born with instinctive curiosity and the need for questioning anything and everything and checking everything out gradually loose their instinctive knack for 'questioning the status quo' as they are trained in the rights and wrongs of the society, the educational system, the organizational systems and performance systems. They are trained to know and follow the 'right' answers, the 'right' solutions and 'best practices' without knowing when to question those answers, solutions and practices. After all, aren't the 'best practices' supposed to be followed and the 'right answers' to be discovered to get the points, marks and stars in the hallowed educational and organizational systems!!

After all, based upon years of hammering of the goodness of experience and memory, how can humans shed their love with 'what they already know'. Many executives often remark that if they knew what their organization knew, they would be able to double or triple the organization's performance. I believe they are stuck in the old business model where knowing and knowledge is interpreted in terms of rules of thumb, procedures, processes and 'best practices' at any given point of time. Somehow, they assume that such knowledge that had given them past successes can be 'projected into' the future to provide them sustainable success. Faced with a future that is increasingly difficult to predict based upon past data, they find themselves hobbled by their experiences of past 'best practices,' specialized expertise that worked for the wunderthings of yesterday and memory that always suggest: "Geez it always worked in the past... Let me give another shot at the same good old best practice." This predicament is well captured in the words of the late Harvard professor who had once noted: "Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think, and suspicious of men who try to."

However, they miss the lessons learnt by executives of companies such as GM and IBM, who, to their dismay, realized, that they were doing the same stuff harder and harder, however they were more and more out of touch with the fast changing business environment and loosing market share. Their problems became particularly acute as their successes of yesterday didn't translate into successes of tomorrow. For example, IBM, that had been in the habit of pushing 'big iron' couldn't realize when the value perceived by the market shifted from its core business of mainframes to desktops, client servers and software applications. Similarly, GM executives didn't realize for a while why they were loosing market share despite making bigger and bigger gas-guzzlers that were laden with more and more chrome and steel.

Hence, people need to think 'out-of-the-box' where box is the representation of all the tested, tried things that always worked in the past. They would need to think beyond what works today.  They would have to think outside the boundaries of current practices, products, services, organizations and industries as they fall behind the treadmill of faster and more rapid pace of change. The new business environment thus puts a premium on creativity and innovation more than ever before. The more complex technologies and their applications impose greater responsibility on the humans using them to create magical performance -- simply, given the plethora of technologies, there is no one right way to get the best performance out of them. More and more humans will search for 'packaged solutions' but there will be none to solve most of their problems for good. Ongoing learning and unlearning technologies and business practices will be the name of the game for the ever changing mosaic of what we view as services, products, organizations and industries.

Welcome to the new world of business where everything is up for grabs... including experience, expertise, memory and assumptions buried in technology that will be continuously challenged by an ever changing future.

[Based on the established and publicly known empirical evidence, @Brint.com rejects the simplistic representation of Knowledge Management in terms of  "knowing what you know and then profit from it" affirmed by a popular business magazine column.  @Brint.com explains its alternative representation in terms of "obsoleting what you know before others obsolete it and profit by creating the challenges and opportunities others haven't even thought about" as learnt over the last 5 years in developing @Brint.com into a global brand. Informed by the critique of three world-class practitioner journals Journal for Quality & Participation, Asian Strategy Leadership Institute Review, and Executive Intelligence [where it has been published] and hundreds of global community network members of @Brint.com, the working definition of Knowledge Management proposed by @Brint.com has stood the test of time in terms of rigor and relevance of multiple theories and practitioner disciplines and frameworks.]

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