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Is Corporate Wisdom the Answer?

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DQI Bureau
New Update

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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