Two
unrelated and totally dissimilar events triggered off a new thinking in my mind
in early May. One was during a visit to a farmhouse in the little hamlet of
Igatpuri en route to a CSI lecture in Nasik–the farmer, who had been carefully
nurturing a few acres of paddy amidst the scorching heat, was an amazing
combination of the old and the new.
In the middle of the field was a European tent, where he slept at night,
hoping his very presence would keep the wolves away from his crop. His sons and
daughters had as much sophistication and worldly wisdom–one was an excise
inspector in Mumbai, the other a painter of some repute in Pondicherry and the
rest pursuing various traditional business vocations. The binding force in the
family was a passion for farming and an immense pride in their own land…they
all still possessed the wisdom of the farm, handed down for generations.
The other event that sparked off the wisdom insight was watching stage
preparations prior to the Bryan Adams show in Mumbai towards the end of the same
week. The attention given to acoustic details, the meticulous planning and
flawless execution that made the Goregaon stadium similar to Central Park in New
York or even the Wembley Stadium in the UK–where I recently heard Lionel
Richie warble to a British and Indian audience–drove home a moot point. In
show business, as indeed in farming, tremendous wisdom has been gained and
passed along over the years.
So where is the corporate message in all this, or am I suggesting that in
difficult times, when salaries are frozen and projects hard to come by in the
software sector, every software engineer should start learning about tractors or
amplifiers? No, the point is that there is a lot one can still learn from the
science and art of knowledge management in steering organizations through these
difficult times.
KM: The DIKW Quartet
The data-information-knowledge-wisdom quartet has, in many senses, been the
story of evolution in the information technology industry in India and abroad.
Data, in its raw form, was what the original EDP managers struggled to capture
and store and indeed print through bulky tape drives and line printers for the
benefit of a largely unimpressed user community. The process of analysis,
correlation and summarizing added value and lent some context to the data. Thus
was born the information era, with MIS managers receiving a slightly warmer
welcome in corporate echelons than their hapless EDP counterparts.
As more and more experiential inputs started becoming important, with CRM and
its analytics becoming key tools for organizations to know their capricious
customers better, the process of discussion, contextualization, interpretation
and experience created the desire and need to manage knowledge and the science
of knowledge management began to emerge.
In an interview in the Institute of Knowledge Management’s journal
Knowledge Directions, John Seely Brown, director of Xerox Corporation’s Palo
Alto Research Centre, said: "Information is fundamentally dis-embeddable,
and therefore, transportable and re-embeddable, while knowledge is not.
Knowledge lives in its context." This is a paradox, because it would seem
that the whole purpose of knowledge management is to transport knowledge across
generations and geographies to enable recruits to get productive on the job much
faster and customers to get better satisfaction through their interactions with
service providers.
In this paradox lies the true challenge of knowledge management and the
reason for the limited successes that KM practitioners have enjoyed. While over
80% of major global corporations have a KM initiative in place, the jury is
still out on how successful KM can be when dealt with as a systematic tool-based
approach. This holds more weight when viewed without taking full cognizance of
the behavioral challenges associated with the process of acquiring, storing,
disseminating and using knowledge through the length and breadth of an
organization.
Building corporate wisdom
As if the dilemmas and questions thrown up by knowledge management were not
enough, here is one more dimension–the last lap of the DIKW quartet. What
makes one organization more capable than the competition? What makes it succeed
in prosperous and difficult times, consistently meeting stakeholder expectations
and delighting its customers? It definitely would seem to call for consistency
in processes and people, maturity in management and customer expectations, or
quite simply, great wisdom. Wisdom on the part of the CEO and the board, wisdom
on the part of corporate planners, product designers, solution architects,
pre-sale and delivery teams and even the sales force.
This level of wisdom clearly calls for careful indoctrination and even a
passion for customer and stakeholder satisfaction, probably what the old farmer
in Igatpuri had succeeded at with his own children. But in an environment where
people change quite fast and time is the most elusive commodity, real wisdom can
be built in an organization only through the conscious practice and use of these
three technology applications:
-
Business intelligence, installed
as the core of every market facing application: Whether it is COGNOS or any
other tool that is used, the core need is to glean intelligence out of each
and every customer interaction and transaction and have it available in a
form that is quickly dis-embeddable and transportable to all customer
handlers within and even outside the organization; -
Knowledge management engines:
These should be able to acquire knowledge from the Web, internal and
external e-mails, data and text-bases and even tacit transactions. These
should subsequently be sorted and collated along with customer business
intelligence, analyzed and re-embedded into the applications of every
category of internal and external stakeholder. Most important, of course, is
the process of dissemination and usage, which ultimately determines the
value of that knowledge. -
E-learning architectures spread
across the organization: The apparent failure of Web-based training in
recent times to generate anything more than some initial fancy for free
courses has made many organizations throw the baby out with the bath water
and abandon all attempts to make e-learning a profitable proposition, at
least in the retail education segment. The real value, however, remains to
be unlocked in the corporate sector, where corporate universities on the Web
can enable valuable knowledge transfer to take place through carefully
designed learner management systems and compelling content that is optimized
for the medium of delivery of learning.
Toward wiser organizations
Will the combination of business intelligence, knowledge management and
e-learning enable organizations of the future to become wiser than their
predecessors? Judging from the dot-com fiasco and the subsequent slowing down of
all economic sectors and the slithering stock market, it would seem that we will
never learn… human frailty will force us repeatedly into cycles of economic
euphoria and disillusionment.
But in all this, there is hope that a few wise corporations will emerge and
sustain in each sector of business and industry, companies that are truly
sagacious in their ability to predict, adapt and thrive in changing times.
Hopefully, the use of judiciously chosen and carefully implemented technology
will have a major role to play in their success.
Ganesh Natarajan
former president of Aptech and a founder-director of BConnectB, is deputy
chairman and managing director of Zensar Technologies.