Abstract
This article is a personal view of the development of data, information and knowledge management at the London Legacy Development Corporation. It describes some of the methods and approaches the Information Services team took to develop and implement information management standards and tools and techniques. It is in the form of a case study which describes some of the challenges which were faced and how these were dealt with. The article looks at the relationship between data, information and knowledge and what these mean within a working business environment.
Keywords
Introduction
The London 2012 Olympic Games were a huge success. The challenge following the games is to ensure a lasting legacy of sport, jobs, housing, education and opportunities. The London Legacy Development Corporation is working on realizing this legacy.
This article describes the approach taken by the Information Services team to implement effective approaches to information and knowledge management within the London Legacy Development Corporation (the Legacy Corporation).
This is my personal view and assessment of what the issues are, and how we have worked to answer the questions and challenges.
The objective has been to create a framework of standards, techniques and process to ensure the effective management of data, information and knowledge. The two key challenges have been to ensure that essential information is transferred from predecessors such as the Olympic Delivery Authority, and that new information and knowledge adds to this legacy data to support the delivery of a wide range of transformation projects.
In order to achieve this, we have been required to listen to and understand the organization and to work with it to develop and embed approaches, standards and processes that ensure useful data, information and knowledge management practices at personal, team and organizational levels. This has been managed in a way that has taken people with us and used their expertise to inform our approaches. Our learning approach has ensured that we have built on success and exploited the lessons from failure.
The London Legacy Development Corporation
Any strategy for information and knowledge action must align with the organization it will support. The Legacy Corporation’s purpose is: To promote and deliver physical, social, economic and environmental regeneration of the Olympic Park and its surrounding area. In particular to maximize the legacy of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, by securing high-quality sustainable development and investment, ensuring the long-term success of the facilities and assets within its direct control and supporting and promoting the aim of convergence.
To put this purpose into context, the Legacy Corporation is responsible for the redevelopment of an area which includes the site of the 2012 Olympic Games. This is a major regeneration project which includes making changes to some of the Olympic venues, selling land, working with developers, managing the development of new infrastructure such as roads and bridges and working with stakeholders including Crossrail and local authorities.
The Legacy Corporation is a relatively small organization for the size of the area it is managing and the scale of the projects it is delivering. It has a very wide and diverse range of specialist skills, held by what can be termed knowledge workers. These people work with existing data, information and knowledge and create new knowledge in the course of projects and decision making. Very detailed and specialist data, information and knowledge also needs to be shared with other organizations. Some of this transfer must be highly secured as it contains commercially sensitive and legally privileged content. The organization actively works to be open and transparent.
The role of the Information Services team is both strategic and operational. It is responsible for developing a corporate strategy for data, information and knowledge management, and for creating and implementing the rules, standards and guidance to make the policies effective. It manages information security, information risk, compliance, records management and data quality. But it cannot do this alone. It is only by encouraging ownership of data within the organization and creating collective responsibility around compliance and security that it can be effective.
In developing a framework for the organization of data, information and knowledge within the Legacy Corporation, we have found it essential to focus on the relationship between people and technologies and how data, information and knowledge are created and managed by people, using technologies and personal contact.
Planning and developing an information and knowledge framework: The principles
At the beginning of this work I found it essential to create working definitions of data, information and knowledge. Rather than single sound bites which can be meaningless, definitions were considered in the context of what these might mean for the organization. The definitions below have been very helpful for the Information Services team although we have not insisted in a dogmatic way that everyone needs to learn them.
The definitions were useful and needed for the Information Services team because they are part of the underlying theoretical basis of what we do. While the business users do not need to learn the theories that underpin data, information and knowledge management, I do think that information professionals need to understand them. The better the theoretical knowledge of information professionals, the more effective practical implementation becomes.
Definitions – data, information, knowledge
For the purposes of the Legacy Corporation we decided on the following definitions: Data is simply the organization of letters, numbers and characters, either singularly or in combination. Information is the arrangement of those basic building blocks: the ordering of letters, numbers and characters so they have context and can express meaning. Knowledge is having the skill, expertise and experience to understand information and apply it in practical ways to deliver programmes and projects, make decisions, and administer people, finances and technologies.
These concepts are not arranged hierarchically, and do not develop in a linear way. They have an ongoing and developing relationship with each other. Information Services works with all three. For example, knowledge is needed to decide what data is collected and in what form.
In terms of practical application of the definitions, I tend to think of data as being in data sets, and data sets supporting applications such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS). For example, there are 137 data sets which make up the GIS. To create ownership of each data set, and to ensure there is a named person with responsibility for the accuracy, relevance and completeness of data, the idea of ‘data steward’ has been introduced. A data steward is someone who looks after particular data sets.
We provide information about things; about physical objects, policies, technologies, for example, ‘Please use this link on the intranet to find information on how to use the FTP service’. Everyone is working with information and knowledge, but not necessarily with data sets, and may not be a data steward.
When we began to ask the question, ‘how do we define knowledge’, the answer seemed to be, ‘the stuff in people’s heads’. But when we thought about this more, it became clear that knowledge is being captured all the time, for example, in short and simple emails, for example:
Question – ‘Do you know when the remediation works were completed?’
Reply – ‘yes that was January 2012. It should have been the middle of December 2011, but due to heavy snow there was a slight delay’.
Knowledge does not need to be complex, and its capture does not need to be complicated.
Data, information and knowledge can all be captured, digitized, stored and shared. But they have to be seen as part of a wider range of attributes only possessed by people, rather than machines; these include skills, intelligence, expertise, experience, critical thinking.
People and technologies
People
The staff of the organization can be described as knowledge workers. They are graduates, or people with professional qualifications, or highly trained and with large amounts of experience gained from working in real life environments.
What do such people do? They discuss, think, read, write, draw, design, solve problems, propose solutions, create strategies, assess options, plan and ask questions. They need to learn what to ask, and how to ask it. They need to know how to find data, information and knowledge and how to use it effectively. They need to understand how to use formal processes and procedures and comply with statutory and contractual obligations.
They actively accumulate new knowledge. They apply knowledge to projects, building things, making decisions, organizing work, people and technologies.
They need to understand how to move data and information and knowledge between people within and external to the organization. This means understanding how to communicate through email, to write and present clearly, and how to share with relevant contacts.
As a group, knowledge workers often have strong opinions; they are right to do so, they are often employed for their professional expertise and they need to be able to keep this up to date and relevant. They do so actively.
Technologies
A rather useless catchphrase which pops-up sometimes at conferences is, ‘it’s not about technologies’. Actually, that is simply not true. Remove all the technologies from offices, factories, farms, schools, shopping malls, and the whole experience of work, production, leisure and consumption would be completely different.
It is much more helpful to consider how all those computers, keyboards, monitors, smartphones, devices, cameras, printers, photocopiers, scanners, network cables, audio visual equipment, servers, routers are used and what they are in the office for.
Another assertion is that ‘everyone is using social media in their personal lives, and therefore this somehow magically translates to the desk in the office’. This is not really the case either. While there is a much better understanding of the use of technologies, being able to post trivia on social networks is not necessarily the right learning experience for creating complex reports, tracking projects, maintaining databases and publishing coherent business information.
The people-technology gap
We have found that the understanding of the technologies varies considerably, and even between people and specific applications. Some people have a very good understanding of some aspects of the technology they use, and yet are much less proficient on others. However, the technologies themselves often have some annoying inbuilt limitations which do not help attitudes towards using them. With the enormous power of hindsight, it is frustrating to think that collaborative document management could have been hard-wired into computers and applications, not something developed as an afterthought, and then marketed as some visionary discovery.
The technologies fascinate and frustrate in equal measure, but what is of interest is the mixed ways of working they beget. At a personal level, it still puzzles me to go to meetings and watch a dozen people scribing on paper notebooks, rather than to have one person creating a real-time write up, which can then be stored and managed centrally with shared access. It is the digitization of the workplace which to me is the challenge, rather than declaring ‘it’s not about technologies’.
The Legacy Corporation’s data, information and knowledge requirements
The data, information and knowledge requirements of the Legacy Corporation are complex, but not so complex that they cannot be understood. Be wary of would-be trendsetters who paint a gloomy picture of complication and complexity, as if the information issues are moving beyond human comprehension. There are finite limits to most business requirements, databases, information resources and knowledge management. It is more a case of understanding the needs and parameters, rather than feeling despair at the possible size of the task.
Understanding the data, information and knowledge requirements has been vital in helping to identify the parameters for our work, and in establishing what is actually useful and needed.
The Legacy Corporation needs a range of data including socio-economic, financial, environmental, transport, housing related and so on. This data can be in the form of data sets and informs decision making, programme planning and project delivery.
Information is needed about work which has been carried out on venues, land, bridges, structures and other physical objects. This includes health and safety files, operation and maintenance manuals, final as-built drawings. All of this information is created and managed digitally. This information is usually in the form of PDFs and CAD files.
Knowledge is either explicit or tacit. If the knowledge is explicit it is captured in a range of forms such as final as-built drawings, health and safety files, operation and maintenance manuals and so on. Tacit knowledge is that knowledge which is in people’s heads. This may be knowledge which someone needs to do their job, or knowledge which is essential for the organization to function. Generally speaking, there is no one person who has so much knowledge which only they hold, that they become indispensable. The Legacy Corporation is a Mayoral Development Corporation and therefore has statutory obligations to keep full and accurate records about decision making, board meetings, development plans, stakeholder engagement and so on. This information tends to be in the form of documents and reports; spreadsheets and presentations.
Data and information auditing and its impact
At some point in the establishment of the organization, a very powerful myth was created that 5–7 million files were to be transferred from the Olympic Delivery Authority to the Legacy Corporation. Much learning has been achieved by understanding and dispelling this myth.
In anticipation of this file deluge we considered procuring an EDRMS – Electronic Document and Record Management System. The process of capturing the user requirements was useful and it felt as if we were moving, but the direction was not clear.
Two pressures then exerted themselves which redefined our approach. The first was a contractual obligation to create a GIS – Geographical Information System; the second was an analysis of what those 5–7 million files might actually be.
The need to create a GIS meant that detailed questions had to be asked about what data we actually had, what data sets we needed to licence, and what the relationship between the GIS and our business records would be. Understanding the detail of those millions of files began with a high-level analysis of the content, working with the business to ask them what they wanted. Paradoxically, the more the business described their needs, the less Information Services agreed with them. Through a process of critical questioning, the volume of files ‘needed’ fell from millions….….to around 130,000. This reduction in volume turned the requirements for an EDRMS upside down. The initial assessment had been built around a myth which had become axiomatic by its constant repetition in reports, at meetings and informal discussions!
These questions about data and information made us think about the underlying data in a completely different way. As information and knowledge management professionals, perhaps we should have had a clear road map to follow, but it is not always practical to work this way given organizational pressures and we discovered that an iterative approach to problem solving, was critical to how we learned and made progress. This iterative approach was at times a reflection of a lack of our own knowledge, and how we needed to learn in order to be able to progress.
With these experiences we were now able to win an argument for the need for a data audit, a piece of work no one had been convinced about before. The data audit was not a huge piece of work, needing persistence rather than significant time. This was mainly in finding where the relevant data was.
We included everything we could locate. This included the shared network drive, the email system, a construction documentation database, the CAD document store, the GIS, the finance and HR systems, a specialist media database, and an image library. For each data store we identified the name of the system, its physical location, the number of files or pieces of data, the data volume, the system owner, and the costs. These costs were in terms of licences, storage, hosting and so on. The value was in part about understanding how the data related to the technical systems architecture.
The result was condensed in a two page report; this had considerable significance in terms of making people think differently about the data we have, and how it is being used. Empirical evidence changed thinking, without anyone needing to mention culture change. It made the data visible; it provided facts and figures about the data itself – the number of files, the types of files. Instead of being hindered by complexity, we could see the parameters and edges. The results became our discovery level metadata and helped to re-enforce the idea that all data should have a data steward, should be dated and have a description outlining what it is about.
The audit results changed our own thinking too, which was refreshing and liberating. We had created a methodology of how to find answers to key questions; the questions being determined by actual business requirements. Our next piece of work was to do a thorough analysis of the shared network drive using a file analysis tool.
We knew that good information management demanded de-duplication. This has been harder than we expected, because it is not always clear which of the duplicate files is the one which someone has created a link to (for example, within an email), or what file path is being used to access a particular file. However, being able to show business users that there were sometimes as many as 20 copies of the same document scattered within folders created another shift in thinking. Everyone could intuitively understand that 20 copies of exactly the same file are not helpful.
As well as auditing specific data stores such as the shared network drives, we have also approached this issue on the basis of specific information needs, for example, the requirement for accurate CAD files.
To understand this, we have reviewed CAD file locations to assess which repositories contain this information. So far these have been found in the shared network drive, within a specific CAD database, within collaborative construction software, in emails, in H drives and on CDs and portable hard drives. We have gained visibility of the actual files themselves, have begun to collect metadata about those files and are beginning to get to a position where we can de-duplicate those files and ensure there is a single source of the truth.
Should not this all have been done as the organization began life? Yes, of course, but the Legacy Corporation has inherited data from a number of different organizations and in some cases those files have been through half a dozen different document management systems. We have inherited data which has been managed with different sets of standards and which has had varying degrees of quality assurance and document control.
Auditing email
Another key system audited was the email. This contains data, information, knowledge, and trivia. Email is used for workflow, decision making, information and knowledge sharing and social networking. It is part of the social glue that helps to make organizations successful. The Legacy Corporation has a policy of limiting mailbox capacity to 2GB meaning that any one individual can store between 20,000–30,000 emails in their inbox. (Whether any one person can work with that amount of data, or has a business requirement for it, is another matter.)
Even though 2GB is a huge amount of storage, we started to experience considerable pressure from the business to increase this size. Rather than simply refusing (which we also did), we explored the underlying issues. We approached the problem with a range of tactics and this helped us think about knowledge management in the organization. Rather than considering knowledge management in the abstract, we had a physical system – email – and business needs to analyse. And rather than have a workshop on ‘knowledge management’ we organized four workshops on email management which quickly became much wider discussions about the use of data, information and knowledge both inside and outside the Legacy Corporation.
We learned a huge amount, and in groups, people were able to share their knowledge and experience not just of how they were managing or not managing email, but also of how data and information flows in the organization, what information and knowledge is needed, and what the issues around the management, storage and retrieval of this are.
We also offered one-to-one sessions with staff, none of which lasted more than ten minutes, but were very effective. On three occasions, the problem with capacity was resolved by simply right clicking on the ‘Deleted items’ folder and actually deleting the email from there. On another occasion, we asked someone to organize their email by largest files and found the same files over and over again. Again, these provided opportunities to get very close to business users to help to understand what the wider issues are, and what the relationships between people, technologies and data, information and knowledge actually mean in practice. This was a much more refreshing approach than trying to double guess what was going on at the business level.
As well as resolving immediate issues for users in terms of email management and folder structures, we helped increase the overall skills of staff in a way which is effective and useful.
Increasing information responsibility
This work has stimulated people to start understanding that there is a need for human intervention with information and knowledge management, that they have to take responsibility for their information, and that some basic information management is an essential part of working in the digital age. Whenever people said they did not have time to manage their emails, we asked them whether they thought stone masons went home at the end of the day without cleaning their tools!
In the process we created powerful allies who went around the office reporting how helpful our activity was. We won a very important victory here; information management is everyone’s responsibility, and people were recognizing that if you adopt good information management practice, it will make your job easier to do.
We have certainly rarely used the knowledge management term, although that is changing. But we have learned that knowledge management works well when it is related to real and pressing issues, when we learn as much as we explain, when the business feels they can trust us to tell us all the actual things they do with data and technologies all day. Then we get to understand the issues, and can work with the business to develop the relevant structures and frameworks.
And the best questions, which lead on to some of the best discussions usually begin with, ‘I know this sounds like a stupid question but….’
The physical tools and techniques for knowledge management
As suggested at the beginning of this article, there are not wall-like boundaries between the concepts of data, information and knowledge. Each term embodies the other to a lesser or greater degree. They are all mutually dependent on each other. It is not the case that a business classification scheme is an ‘information management’ tool, and has nothing to do with data or knowledge. They have mutually inclusive relationships.
Folder structures, classification and metadata: Finding information
There seems to be a reluctance within the information and knowledge management worlds to be confident and assertive at times. Information and knowledge needs to be organized; this organization can be described in technical terms. Awareness of the need for information and knowledge management needs to be raised. The idea that somehow this can be done without anyone taking any practical notice is wrong. And for those who say, ‘just use a (well known) internet search engine’ it is worth pausing to consider what the advantages and disadvantages of such an approach might be. Those search engines might boast about the thousands upon thousands of returns, but what is less well known is that people rarely get beyond the first ten ‘results’, and so what, therefore is the purpose of the vast quantities of other data? Impressive though it may be, no-one can sift through this.
We have approached this not on the basis of implementing ‘folder structures’ or ‘classification’ but through an initiative called ‘Finding Information’. This is the business requirement: People need to find stuff. By hanging the organization of information and knowledge on the gambit of ‘finding information’ we are hoping to imply and suggest something practical and useful, something that everyone has an interest in. Finding information is part of building the community, part of sending out a clear message about the need to manage information and a means of encouraging people to think about the creation of data, information and knowledge as something which is only useful if both the creator and others can find it in the future. We have also raised the idea that there are multiple ways of searching for information, and these different ways provide a range of opportunities to find information, and in combination, are more likely to be effective.
Organization of data and information
Business classification
A major challenge is that the organization and management of data will change once the Transformation phase is finished, in March 2014. This Transformation phase includes removing temporary structures and changing the venues for post-Olympics use. During Transformation, the data has been divided into 64 sectional completions. Each of these completions has 21 workstream acceptance certificates which includes health and safety files, operation and maintenance manuals and final as-built drawings! A total of around 20,000 digital files will be active records. There are also going to be around 60,000 non-active records. All of these 80,000 files will need to be organized not as 64 sectional completions, but to reflect the running and management of the park as a whole.
How that data is currently organized for the Transformation phase is not how the business will need to use it in the Post-transformation phase. So the business classification has to be developed on future, rather than existing need. For example, there are around 20 separate completions for land. But land will not be managed as twenty separate plots, but as a coherent whole.
A new enterprise business classification has been built, with a set of principles and rules to govern its use and application. This is being used to form part of the information architecture at a conceptual level, and has been integrated into a prototype for an electronic document management system.
The classification has been developed through workshop groups, using a combination of post-it notes, spreadsheets, flip charts and brainstorming. We make suggestions to these groups which everyone can contribute to and find that there are likely to be two quick polarizations. The first is that data which can be easily grouped and classified, the other being data which cannot be easily grouped and classified. The third initial group is the data which hangs between these two points.
But it can be done. A good example is the previous folder structure used by one large team. At the outset of this piece of work there were 137 separate folders. Their labels were a mix of people’s names, high-level concepts such as contracts and terms that are relatively useless in a classification, such as ‘other’ or ‘misc’. We worked closely with the admin staff to show them the necessary techniques for creating classification. Having convinced them, they then worked with the rest of the team to move from 137 folders to 11, with a structure which reflected the function of the whole team, rather than an information muddle.
There was also a small political (with a small p) victory here. The message sent out to the organization was, if a large team could be convinced, then just about anyone else could be too!
As part of the wider development of the business classification scheme we printed it out on A3 sheets to conduct user testing. This involves a ten minute one-to-one session with volunteers who are asked to explain which term they would select to answer a question such as ‘how would you find the annual report?’ This type of user testing is low on resources but high on useful insights and perspectives.
And building the resource into an electronic prototype has given us another way to test the terms and structure through the mediation of a computer screen and mouse, which is how it will be used.
Finding information
Directory of information
The business classification scheme has been used to develop the first iteration of a directory. What is the difference? Well one thing we have found is that a directory enables us to experiment more with layout and visualization of terms. It is interesting to see how changes in design change the perception of the organization of data and information. The directory is a way of taking the hierarchy of the classification and spreading it out and organizing it in alternative ways.
It is another way into the information; another way to organize and manage the information and another way to retrieve.
A-Z of information
An A-Z is one of the most intuitive ways to organize and retrieve information. It has also allowed some creative licence by enabling different facets to be described at different points in the structure.
Creating an A-Z of information has enabled us to understand further what the key information stores are, and what the key concepts are to describe those stores.
Information management standards
To help organize data and information a small set of information management standards have been created. We decided to develop three standards which could be implemented, rather than 30 standards which would be largely ignored. The three chosen were document control, data transfer and email management.
Document control is a basic table of key metadata. This includes date, purpose of issue, title, description, author, file path, contributors, distribution, status, version control.
The Data transfer standard defines the use of secure FTP (file transfer protocol) rather than a Heath Robinson array of webmail, CDs and whatever application someone might find on the web.
The Email management standard aims to get business users to understand which emails are business records and why they need to be managed alongside the activities they relate to, rather than within individual mailboxes.
There are clear business benefits to using these standards, and as explained to business users, doing this properly is actually less effort than doing it badly.
Organizational layers and knowledge management
When the TCP/IP protocols which underpin the Internet were being developed, the engineers created seven layers, including the transport layer, communication layer and so on. They would joke that the hardest layer was unseen; the political layer. It is quite a useful way of thinking about organizations; that they consist of layers that fold, blend and separate in different ways, depending on context and environment.
In terms of understanding data, information and knowledge in the organization, we also found it useful to think of layers. A thought layer, a conversational layer, a digital layer. We then needed to consider how these layers interact, impact and influence each other.
Conversations are key ways to exchange and develop organizational and collective knowledge. Their strength is that ideas can be developed and tangential whilst irrelevant considerations can naturally atrophy and be lost. This is useful. Digital technologies encourage the keeping of everything and this needs to be controlled and managed. There are enough challenges in curating all we need to keep, without making extra labour by trying to manage what we do not need.
A key forum for conversations is meetings, and well organized and well chaired meetings are crucial to facilitate this process. We have found that informal meetings and drop-in workshops work very well for particular subjects. We organized a set of sessions on ‘email management’ on an open door policy. The strength of these was that people came along and described in detail, and often candidly, how they were actually using the email system. Some of these meetings turned into wide-ranging and lengthy discussions, from which we learned a huge amount about user behaviour and their interaction with technologies.
In these sessions a huge amount of knowledge was captured which we were able to use to create much more effective practices which business users both welcomed and started to use. The collective knowledge of business users is then effectively shared and helps to raise the overall skill levels across the organization.
We also organize regular information security inductions for both new and existing members of staff. This is an opportunity to raise awareness about the key issues, but again to learn from the business itself. Again these have often turned into wider discussions about technologies in the workplace, the implications of changes such as bring your own device and the challenges of the exponential increase in content – in the form of data, information and knowledge. It is often the tangential issues which come up, which help us learn about what the business users are really thinking, rather than what we presume they are thinking.
One of the issues we discovered through these formal and informal discussions is that organizations have myths. For example, ‘FTP does not work’ or ‘if you bring your own notebook to work, it does not count in a Freedom of Information request’. Discovering the myths in an organization is a sign that you are working very closely with people and they are beginning to trust you. It enables you to build on that trust, and it gives an opportunity to provide leadership and direction to take people out of the land of myth and into spaces where they feel more comfortable and secure with handling digital content and devices.
And trust is a key to building knowledge management. Knowledge may be power in certain contexts, but often people do not share knowledge because they fear it is inadequate, or of poor quality. What is a key determinant about sharing knowledge? Whether you trust who it is being shared with. The more you trust someone, the more you will share and that helps create wider and deeper perspectives, from which new knowledge can be created.
Conclusions
At the Legacy Corporation, we work in a learning environment and we have developed and implemented techniques to support that at both a formal and informal level. We are beginning to understand the strengths and weaknesses of what we are trying to do and we are constantly learning from the business about its needs and about information and knowledge management.
We are developing iterative ways of working, approaching problem solving on the basis that we may not understand the conclusion or result before we start. We have encouraged a culture among ourselves of taking controlled risks where we can make mistakes and learn from them. Some pieces of work have led nowhere; but we have learned from them, and then approached and solved a problem in a different way. Sometimes an issue dissolves before we have concluded anything formally. But developing this type of learning technique where we are inquisitive and critical about the knowledge we acquire is invaluable.
We still do not know what the true extent of the organizational knowledge is. We do not know where the boundaries are and what the coverage is. We do not know what the knowledge footprint is, and to be honest, we are not sure how to determine this, or whether we even need to. Can some knowledge be lost because it no longer has value? How can we determine the extent of the organization’s knowledge and how do we know if this knowledge is held by individuals or is collective? Knowledge is captured but we do not always call it that. ‘Lessons learned’ works. Extensive knowledge can be condensed into a one line description in a risk register.
There are many informal techniques for collecting knowledge. Varying working hours to catch people first thing in the morning or in the evening when there may be few people around; the informal animated discussions which start as soon as a formal meeting happens. It is understanding these, as well as the formal ways of collecting data, information and knowledge which helps to provide both the bird’s eye and worm’s eye view of what is going on in the organization.
Data, information and knowledge needs to be expressed and made visible. This is what formal tools and techniques such as classification schemes can do. Knowledge can be captured in bullet points and short emails.
Finding things when they are needed, and trusting its completeness and accuracy is harder, but not impossible.
Raising awareness about these issues and constantly learning from the business and professional colleagues and peers is something any information services or knowledge management team can do.
That means working with the business as allies, trusting them and helping everyone to raise their skills and knowledge.
There are no sound bites which can answer all this. But persistence, the ability to listen and change things will go a long way to tackling one of the harder issues of all; cultural change. We feel that is happening in relation to information and knowledge management, and while it is difficult to quantitatively measure this, there are intangible benefits which can be felt.
This is never going to be a closed initiative, but something ongoing which will continue to change and develop. This is why we think developing a methodology as we have tackled the work has been more productive than endless planning. We need to be able to adapt, and at times quickly, while at the same time imposing standards and techniques which will control the management of data, information and knowledge so these resources support business needs.