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What is Knowledge Management?
by Nigel Tolley, www.rubbertreeplant.co.uk
It strikes me that the Internet, useful as it is, constitutes a great source of what the military used to call "bum dope," there being no screening or editing involved in the release of material. It also is in large measure redundant. Many kind folks have written in to respond to questions I have put in these Commentaries with information that they got off the Internet. That information they derived from encyclopædias which I already have. Not to complain, but information, per se, is of no use without the wisdom to use it well. We have plenty of information-what we need is wisdom.
- Jeff Cooper, Rifleman, Ex-USMC, Historian
The issues of knowledge management are deep and taxing.
For the first time in history, the amount of data available from the world in just a few minutes far exceeds that which any human could assimilate in a lifetime.
Background
In the past, the number of people was below a certain threshold, the level at which people could be left totally free to think, without the constant worry of starvation or death. Today massive support systems exist, in the form of socialist government and large corporations, so that what was once an elite activity, thinking, pondering, philosophy, has become commonplace. With the creation and introduction of integrated computer systems and networks and before that the photocopier and carbon paper, and the telephone and telegraph, ideas were also freed to move faster than people.
In "this world of decreasing half-life of ideas"1 , the pace of change has massively accelerated. Every new idea is instantly improved upon, or otherwise modified, in order to
fulfill it's potential in the shortest possible time. It took over a thousand years for the simple waterwheel to develop fully, then it took about 100 years for the motor car to become fully developed.
The silicon chip has allowed things to develop even faster, with computing power more than doubling logarithmically every 18
months2. As information transfer rates have increased, in step with the "thinking time" people now have, the rate of evolution of any idea has become correspondingly shorter. Waterwheels took hundreds of years to slowly creep across the face of the developing world. Data was transferred only as fast as the person carried it, and once it arrived, time had to be found to look at it and, sometimes, implement it. Today, ideas travel at the speed of light, and hundreds of people are waiting ready to see if this could be the next "step change", just like the original waterwheel.
To maintain a competitive edge, companies, governments and individuals must be able to sort and rank ideas very rapidly, then farm them out to the required expert in the field. However, with the number of changes, ideas and plans comes more. In the past, the overhead of sending a letter to the Far East was sufficient that only fairly important data was transferred. Newspapers and magazines were checked, as the cost of a mistake was high. As the speed has increased, the usage has also gone up, and the resulting unit costs have plummeted. Thousands of people routinely pass on jokes, stories and other "noise" without a thought, sending them around the world in an instant.
According to Alex Lightman3 , there are 8 laws of technology. One of these is Ruettgers' Law, which says that companies double their digital-storage requirements every 12 months (now seven months in the United States.) Corporations are digitizing at an amazing rate, but 70% of all information is still in a paper format. Metcalfe's Law of Network Value holds that the value of a network goes up much faster than the actual addition rate of new nodes.
Perhaps this is why internet companies are valued so massively, whilst returning little
profit?
If we assume the average person still has the same number of brilliant ideas per year, and the number of people has only grown by a factor of ten, then, as the amount of data traffic has increased about a million times over the past hundred years, the signal to noise ratio has massively decreased. For every dispatch containing a good idea, you may receive a hundred emails, letters and telephone calls without. Retrieving this data has become a major logistical headache.
How then, can we use the technology that created the information overload problem, to solve it?
