Fashion and Style News | newsfashionstyle.com

Posts Tagged ‘tacit knowledge’

Yesterday, quoting Denis Pombriant, we describedhow today’s methods of doing business through email are far in advanceof most organizations’ abilities to organize the information beingtransferred. Not that email is advanced, more that it’s outdated in anage progressing rapidly with technologies of collaboration.

As we have said before, Email is Buried Treasure, waiting to be unearthed, and polished, and valued.

Thevast depository of unstructured information in any large enterpriserepresents a wealth of knowledge that should be mined, and codified forretrievability.

Knowledge is what matters now – and alwaysdid, else why communicate in the first place? The great value ofEnterprise 2.0, deriving from the technologies and examples of Web 2.0,lies in using the database as repository for all information, separatedfrom its media of transfer and consumption.

While we asusers focus on the synergies of collaboration, the data generated atevery turn is being codified on the fly, for perpetual subsequentre-use. The power of this, as Dennis Pombriant says in his article,lies in absolute consensus:

“More than simply providing a central repository forall of this information, the knowledgebase provides the checks andbalances needed to maintain a single version of the truth. There canonly be one current corporate presentation, for example, and it servesno one if a sales representative must compare multiple ones to figureout which is right – that’s the power of a repository.” – Sales Effectiveness Through Knowledge

The knowledgebase is the central store of what we unabashedly call wealth: the codified sum of knowledge of any organization. Much more knowledge exists than is codified of course: tacit knowledge exists as a tantalizing potential to be distilled from knowledge workers by clever software acting usually in real time.

Thegreat opportunity for IT in this time is to implement systems ofcommunication and collaboration that are compelling and liberatingenough in their own right that the organization’s users choose them bypreference, rather than going outside the firewall or governance.

At the same time, all these systems need to operate on standards compliant with the knowledge management systems. All the data needs to be integrated, and all of it should come under IT’s management. Open standards such as XML are the obvious example of how to develop for future integration.

Thetransition from email to collaboration systems will not be easy: wehave a huge investment in our email clients, holding sometimes a decadeof information. And having to switch into a different application needsto become a completely seamless operation. Browsers themselves need alot more interface development. But the alternative is madness. We’realready fragmented in our working lives by different sources ofinformation, running on different protocols, as First Monday reports:

“Mid-size and large organizations employing knowledgeworkers are greatly impacted by the Infomania phenomenon, also referredto as Information Overload or Attention Deficit Trait (ADT). Infomaniais the mental state of continuous stress and distraction caused by thecombination of queued messaging overload and incessant interruptions.

“On average, knowledge workers can expect threeminutes of uninterrupted work on any task before being interrupted.Sources of interruption include email, instant messages, phone calls,text messages, co-workers, and other distractions. The majority ofthese distractions are attended to immediately. The result is thatpeople average 11 minutes on any one ‘working sphere’ (project) beforeswitching to another project altogether.” – Infomania: why we can’t afford to ignore it any longer

Dovetail Software Blogs : Email Needs To Collaborate