Just about every company is really in the information business. Let that sink in for a minute. While this idea may run contrary to conventional thinking, it is precisely what forward-thinking organizations believe. In a recent article for KMWorld, we see that Tom Steward, Editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review believes fundamentally that "the real value of a business is in what it knows" and that "much of a business' work consists of developing and sharing knowledge." And its not just KM fanatics or academics that feel this way. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, an Exxon manager explains why Exxon is more in the information business than the oil extraction business; because everyone knows how to extract oil, but Exxon knows how to do it better and faster. It is that information--that corporate knowledge--that makes Exxon valuable. Guided by principles of agility, we expect system requirements to change in ways we cannot anticipate and we prepare for such change by building solutions that are both simple and flexible. Recognizing that information is a valuable asset--perhaps the most valuable asset--in a business or organization, it is only prudent to represent, persist, and utilize (i.e., "manage") knowledge artifacts with great flexibly. Not doing so may appear, at times, to be the simplest thing to do, but this is usually an illusion. Incidentally, the idea behind MySmartChannels is to provide a simple, lightweight, yet flexible platform for managing knowledge artifacts, especially tacit knowledge items that are typically unstructured and difficult to capture in conventional information systems. Most of this "business know-how", despite its high value, exists only in people's heads or is hopelessly lost in the tsunami of messages jamming everyone's e-mail folders. |
