Week 2 - Blog away

Looks like I’m still afloat, just barely. As of this morning, I have successfully made it through another project go live at work. I am pretty much caught up in my other two courses here at DePaul and it is time to invest a little more time into this course. Funny thing is, the more I read and listen to the lectures the more questions open up. I suppose this is a good thing, gets the old gears in my head turning.

A very good question was asked during the second lecture, “which would I rather have, truth or knowledge?” At first thought my answer was truth hands down. What is the point of having knowledge if the knowledge you have is not correct. What good is knowing something if what you know is a lie? Having incorrect knowledge can lead to wrong decisions in life. The definition of truth is “that which accords with reality, truth tends to foster success”.

Then somebody might argue that knowing the truth is not necessarily always good. Example you ask? Let’s say that your wife asks you if you like the new pink dress shirt with purple polka dots she bought you for your birthday. Do you think she wants the truth or a truth that might sound a bit more pleasing to the ear?

Now we are going to shift gears a bit and discuss some of the articles.


CFO - It’s who you know

This was a very short easy reading article. What I got from it was quick talk about a repository model versus a network model. It’s true, you always hear about companies trying to take inventory of their employees and what their competencies are. This knowledge is invaluable to an organization for multiple reasons. Quick one that comes to mind is project management, it is essential that you assign the right person to the task/role.

One quote that did stick out was from Michael Idinopulos and Lee Kempler from McKinsey & Co. “Don’t try to bottle the expertise, just be content to find it when you need it.” This goes back to knowing the right person versus trying to extract all the knowledge from everybody in your organization and attempt to store the information. Sometimes it is easier and faster just to know who to ask.


CFO - That’s why we use lots of acronyms

Another very short read. This is an interesting article simply stating the increase of information in our world. So it would take 2,108 years to watch every film and video ever produced. The article does a nice job of making you take a step back and realizing that there is way more information out there then you or I will ever be able to consume in our lifetime. I guess this is where knowledge management would come in, weed out all the relevant and useful information and not bother with the garbage.


Bohn - Measuring and Managing Technological knowledge

Bohn’s article on technological knowledge had some very interesting and very valid points. Of course he throws in a few definitions describing the difference between raw data, information and knowledge but what this article is mainly about is how he puts a process in place describing the different levels of knowledge within any organization. Bohn believes that technological knowledge can be defined by understanding the effects of the input variables on the end state or output. That being said, knowledge towards something can be either at stage one which is complete ignorance which we know is not unlikely for many cases or stage eight which is Complete Knowledge which is almost impossible to get to this stage.

I can appreciate how he breaks his information into simplistic, very common scenarios such as the process in baking cookies. Using this example he is able to better explain the eight stages of knowledge and the correlation between the different stages of knowledge and procedure changes when baking cookies. Once you have a better understanding “knowledge” of all of the variables that can and will affect your procedure you can plan accordingly. By doing so you will have improved your process therefore saved time and money.

One paragraph towards the beginning of the article that did stick out was “although an organization’s knowledge base may be its single most important asset, its very intangibility makes it difficult to manage systematically.” To me, this is the whole issue with knowledge management. You will hear time and time again how a company’s most important asset is its knowledge. How do we capture all the tacit, unstructured knowledge? Stay tuned, we will find answers.