Ton’s Interdependent Thoughts: Every Signal Starts Out As Noise
This is an insightful, if long (for a weblog), examination of what knowledge management and the world of weblogs (unfiltered/unedited, self-published notes and observations) can bring to the workplace or enterprise.
There’s nothing about ROI or the bottomline in here. At least not directly: the underlying point is that you can’t always isolate what might be valuable.
The hope is that by examining everything and trying to understand the seething welter of ideas that exist in any workspace, you learn more about what goes on there. Can you learn too much about what your organization does? Are you sure everyone has the same understanding? Do you know where your work practices overlap a colleague’s? Or perhaps where they don’t quite meet?
But rather than address the more esoteric, I have a simpler example.
I’m reluctant to repeat the old buzzwords about flattening hierarchies and re-engineering the enterprise, but one of the more important lessons to learn in any any organization is finding out who can say “yes,” who can make things happen. It’s not always someone with a corner office — it often isn’t — but learning who these folks are and how to work with them can be essential. This is an area where weblogs or other internal communication tools can really help.
There are a couple of ways I have seen this work. Alfred, the person who understands How Things Work, has knowledge that, regardless of his willingness to share, is not accessible: he’s not able to publish or broadcast it, and the organization suffers, in some small way from inefficiency, duplication of effort or missed opportunities.
Conversely, Alice is well-known as a keeper of all kinds of useful information, and her knowledge is in such demand that it gets in the way of her doing her “real job.” If she had some way of offloading this information, the organization would be enriched and she wouldn’t have to stay so late every night.
As common as these information resources are — every workplace has them — it’s rare for them to hoard what they know. Anyone who takes the trouble to learn the various nuances and tricks of a system is generally happy to pass them along. Where knowledge management can help is by finding out where the repositories of information are and finding some way of making that wealth available.
The other aspect of Ton’s post is that we don’t always know the wheat from the chaff: we can’t ignore anything, nor can we filter effectively until we become accustomed to what we’re seeing. How many times are we confronted with something that looks or sounds like noise until we learn more about it?
In a couple of earlier posts, I used an old analogy to differentiate between data and information: to my mind, data is unfiltered while information is somehow filtered or organized to make it informative. Not as elegant as a knowledge management professional might put it, but it’s proved serviceable in the past.