With a slight nod to the last post at this site (e-Discovery: The Next Success Story for Knowledge Strategists?) and a hope for moving forward with some good progress with KM, knowledge services, and knowledge strategy in the new year, we take a look at a pair of recent news stories.
On January 7, The New York Times had a story by Ben Protess and Michael J. De La Merced that caught my eye (“Rescued by Bailout, A.I.G. May Sue Its Savior”). Apparently some folks were threatening to sue the U.S. Federal government (the next day’s paper reported that A.I.G. would not participate in the suit).
What startled me was a statement in the description of the planning for the case:
The presentations on Wednesday come on top of hundreds of pages of submissions that the government prepared last year, a time-consuming and costly process. The Justice Department, which assigned about a dozen lawyers to the case and hired outside experts, told a judge handling the matter that [the company behind the suit] was seeking 16 million pages in documents from the government.
“How many?” the startled judge, Thomas C. Wheeler, asked, according to a transcript.
So I got to thinking about how we got to this point. Even 20 years ago, John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene, in Megatrends, made it clear that things were about to get out of hand. Here’s what Naisbitt said in his much-quoted comment: “We are drowning in information and starved for knowledge.”
Trying to put things in context, I went to friend Anne Kershaw, Co-Founder of the e-Discovery Institute, with whom I teach in Columbia’s M.S. in Information and Knowledge Strategy (IKnS) program.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Oh, the stories I could tell you,” Anne said. “The really sad part is that the only reason it’s 16 million pages is because the lawyers likely don’t know what they are doing and are not asking the right questions, i.e., a knowledge audit. Truly, IKnS is the answer to the e-discovery problem.”
Then along comes the January 5, 2013 issue of The Economist.
Lead story? Of course, it’s all about finding out what the business needs to know, under the general heading of Corporate Intelligence: “The Bloodhounds of Capitalism: It’s a Good Time to be a Corporate Investigator.”
Good story-telling. Same topic, different angle, and this one also fits into what we’re talking about. The focus is on the detectives, but you can see the theme: “Corporate detectives sniff out the facts, analyze them, share them with clients … a multi-billion-dollar industry devoted to discovering the truth.”
Here’s the quote from this story:
There is plenty of work to go round. Assignments linked to mergers and acquisitions have dwindled along with the number of deals, but other areas are expanding. One big source of work is the growing complexity of business regulation. Multinationals can never be sure that some employee, somewhere has not violated America’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or some other anti-bribery law. Corporate compliance departments often bring gumshoes in to assist their own investigations.
Kershaw refers to IKnS, using the popular acronym we’re all using these days to refer to information and knowledge strategy, the emerging management methodology that builds on using KM and knowledge services to help a company work with its captured (and perhaps, in this case, to-be-captured) intellectual capital.
I continue to be impressed with how much work is going on with knowledge development and knowledge sharing – what we like to call “KD/KS” – and how much is yet to be done. IKnS is – truly – the solution to what we’re dealing with these days as companies attempt to manage their corporate intellectual assets. For many of us, it’s with IKnS that we are able to contextualize stories like the ones I’m sharing with you here.
And when I say “contextualize” this is what I mean: Who in the company has developed a strategy for dealing with all this information and knowledge? Who is in charge? Who is identifying what needs to be kept and what doesn’t need to be kept? Who has responsibility for making decisions about disposing of what isn’t – or won’t be – needed?
Let’s keep going. It’s a new year and as these stories demonstrate (just two among so many we can’t count them), there’s a good case to be made for IKnS. And there’s a big market out there waiting for us. There is plenty of work to go round.
Guy,
I like this post, but I often wonder if companies really know what they want. Their buzzword is security. They want to protect their IP at all costs, but based on some job descriptions (in my industry), it looks like their approach is to build a huge wall around the company, protect it with a moat, then protect what they have from getting out, an only let whomever they want in. I don’t see advertisements talking about internal organization and managing the info from within.
Karen
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, Karen. You’re definitely on the right track with your thinking, and tonight when dining with a group of management colleagues, the subject came up again, this whole idea of whether senior management and other enterprise leaders have any idea of how important KD/KS is to the success of their organizations.
We can’t do it alone, of course, but we can – as we try to incorporate KM, knowledge services, and knowledge strategy into the corporate fabric – do what we can to ensure that the company leaders hear and acknowledge what we are trying to do. For too long our work has been lost down in the corporate depths, and now that KM is finally being recognized (sometimes) for its contribution to organizational effectiveness, we have to work hard to keep that momentum going.
Watch this space. We’re going to be doing more with this in up-coming posts.
Thank you for responding, Karen.
All the best,
Guy
As you have said it has been an old story about KD & KS. Discussing such topics is a great thing and we share things about our companies but when it comes to ground level it does not happen in companies how large and small they are. Therefore mostly the KD & KS dies of after sometime. I also feel as you have said that without the blessing of senior management it does not work.
Kudos your thoughts are great.
All the best
Thank you, Mamta Joshi, for commenting. Yes, it seems to be an on-going battle, doesn’t it, to secure a “place” in the organization that allows for supporting KD/KS as an essential corporate function. We keep trying, and as long as we are all aware of the value of good KD/KS in the company’s success, and can convince our leaders to provide sponsorship when it’s required, we’ll keep making progress.
Thank you for responding.
Guy
John Tomlinson at the SLA Sub-Sahara Chapter LinkedIn site had this to say:
Interesting piece – intersection of traditional records management with knowledge strategy is critical.
Guy responds:
Thanks, John. And as I learned at the e-Discovery Leadership Summit in Florida back in October, there are real changes going on in the work of what we used to refer to as “records managers” (now called “records coordinators”). The biggest change – from what I observe – is just what you’ve noticed: the intersection of records management (“records coordination”? – I’ll have to get used to this!) and knowledge strategy is indeed critical.
Thank you for your comment.
All the best,
Guy
If they had a tool to collect, organize and share the few valued documents they need for their context, this would not be an issue. I can only recommend to take a look at the low cost, low tech tool which allows anyone to correlate. The technology allows the users to themselves semantically connect and relate the individual documents and files. Or combine K-Map with simple search techniques.
To get a free trail for Windows visit http://www.correlate.com