InformationWeek

March 16, 1998

Knowledge-Management Cosmology

By Jeff Angus and Jeetu Patel

nowledge management is not a technology, but a concept, a way of doing business. Around it revolve four processes (see diagram below). All can be achieved through automation, through human intervention, or, most commonly, both.

Gathering is the bringing in of information and data into the system. Organizing is the process of associating items to subjects, giving them context, making them easier to find. Refining is the process of adding value by discovering relationships, abstracting, synthesis, and sharing. Disseminating is getting knowledge to the people who can use it.

Each of these processes is supported by products, which in turn are supported by technologies. For an organization to achieve knowledge management, it will need manual actions or products to support each of the four processes. Because no product is a complete knowledge management-support solution, almost all organizations will need to anneal multiple products and redesign processes.

There's more, though, to know about the products: the kind of knowledge they're designed to disseminate, and the way they're designed to disseminate it.

Some products were designed to share emergent knowledge, some to share historical knowledge. Emergent is to keep up with current events that might change the actions you should take today (for commodities traders and pharmacists, for example). Historical is gathered to incrementally improve decisions by building up an archive (plant managers, legislators). Products tend to be built around one or the other kind of knowledge, a nd since your application is likely to revolve around one or the other, you should be aware of the design goal.

Products are designed to either have one or a few people (a hierarchy) decide which data constitute knowledge and which people should see it. A peer model puts those decisions at many people's (or everyone's) desktop. Again, make sure the product's design goal matches your application.

The shaded areas of the box charts throughout the main article show how each product supports each model.