ABSTRACT:
Corporate knowledge management requires that raw data are organized and reassembled in usable forms. Fortunately an efficient and successful model lies easily to hand--the modern news association. This article proposes that corporations adopt this model as a way to efficiently gather, categorize, interpret and disseminate the vast quantities of information they acquire daily.
On September 18, 1997, Oracle Corporation, the world's second-largest software company and manufacturer of a leading database program, announced an alliance with CNN to produce customized news pages for Web users. The service allows readers to build their own information sites, with individualized reports and headlines, stock news, weather and sports. Browsers choose from more than 300 categories, including health, recreation, consumer news and crime.
CNN Custom News, as it's called, takes advantage of Oracle's Web Application Server, a popular database program used by industry to store huge libraries of information such as inventory and customer data. Like these companies, CNN's readers are able to pull real-time information from a repository and carry out text-based, thematic searching and sorting.
"The combination of Oracle's leading information-management technologies and CNN's global news services makes it possible for millions to access personalized news stories, using a solution that takes full advantage of the convenience of network computing," said Beatriz Infante, Oracle's senior vice president of Internet and Media Products.
Knowledge/Information Managers
The implications for company knowledge managers are considerable, since CNN's service offers users speedy access to vast amounts of information that can be tailored to their needs and preferences--in other words, knowledge management.
CNN's first step will be to organize and distribute the incoming data (news) according to established procedures of reporting, editing and publication. This too has implications for knowledge management. My suggestion, as a former journalist and editor, is that modern news organizations provide both models and solutions to the complexities of information production and consumption. Companies implanting networked databases such as Oracle--that is, knowledge archives with clients and consumers--are actually putting into place communications systems that are in many ways analogous to (say) CNN, Reuters and the New York Times. News organizations--print, electronic or webbed--gather information, assemble it into coherent structures and ensure its effective dissemination. Data accurately collected, categorized, arranged and then meaningfully presented is the entire point.
Real-World Examples
But unlike media companies, business corporations lack the methods and traditions necessary to prepare, order and exploit the wealth of information they keep accumulating. Satellite data transfer, telecommunications, remote systems, etc., constantly create fresh kinds of knowledge which can be applied for strategic purposes directly impacting the bottom line. These include customer service, effective marketing, trend analysis and other contributors to profitability.
However, management issues--for instance, who may access the information and how to help employees productively use it--have to be more effectively dealt with. Like editors and journalists, company leaders must be able to understand, regulate and direct the information flow. They need to establish systems that are at once predictable, flexible and responsive.
Here are some examples of the information-management problems corporations currently face. The instances that follow were presented by ISO expert Amy Zuckerman at an April, 1997, forum organized by Strategic Technologies Inc., a software company:
Problems like these arise in part because powerful new technologies, such as EDI (Electronic Data Interface), Global Supply-Chain Management and Digital Data Transfer, generate unprecedented quantities of extremely complex and disparate information. The people running the systems simply don't know how to handle it all, recognize patterns, analyze and/or summarize, or prepare clear reports. This is, in a nutshell, one crucial aspect of the knowledge-management dilemma.
Literacy and Comprehension
In a sense the "tecknowledgy crisis" is a social disease, a consequence of the West's late-20th Century videoculture. TV, computers, movies and now the Web have changed forever the ways we communicate, altering both skills and expectations.
Notoriously, Jane and Johnny can't read, let alone write. Modern line workers, technicians and staff people have been raised almost entirely on electronic images, sound bites and the "eye candy" wiles of the advertising industry. Companies privately acknowledge that key employees are at best semi-literate, yet still expect them to run advanced equipment whose output and instructions are expressed in writing.
For a fuller discussion of these topices see Egan (1993).
Communication problems may begin but certainly don't end with hourly staff and technicians. The hard truth is that many managers are frequently as unlettered as their subordinates, even though leadership is increasingly exercised through the written word.
A software manufacture in the transport field told a colleague of mine: "Technology touches everyone, not just programmers and analysts. It touches everyone from the managers on down and the managers can't write just at a time when the area of data mining is becoming important. It takes a different skill to be able to analyze data, to set and define parameters."
A report in Fortune (1992) notes that in the late 80's/early 90's companies seized upon the power and versatility of word processors as reasons to fire secretaries, insisting that managers could type their own memos and letters. The same survey revealed that administrators at that time were spending up to 70 percent of their work week writing or reading documents. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this percentage has probably gone up since then.
The ability to swiftly and effectively respond to electronic mail has become an important new office skill. Today's managers typically receive (and attempt to deal with) over 100 electronic messages a day. E-mail is an entirely new communications genre, somewhere between letters, phone calls and shouting down the hallway, yet it's all expressed in written form.
For these and other reasons, according to another study (Wordmasters, 1994a), writing has become the single most wide-spread activity in government, industry and business. The paradox of the paperless office is that we're writing and reading more than ever before. Ironically enough, the Internet, despite its superficial resemblance to television, is actually a predominantly literary medium, richer in documents than images. Providing content for company web pages opens up a whole new field for corporate writers. Measured by time and effort, modern companies are principally writing organizations.
Writing also ranks among the most expensive business activities. A big industrial RFP, for instance, might cost several million dollars to prepare. Ninety per cent of the sweat goes into the writing--the equivalent of hundreds and even thousands of valuable manufacturing hours. And if it's not well done, which is frequently the case, the thing must be reworked or, even worse, is turned down--a colossal waste of effort, time and money.
The CEO of a big Massachusetts HMO told me: "Frankly, in business today there's often an inability to write clearly, which also means that readers have difficulty understanding the material they receive."
The facts support this judgment.
The CAD/GAP Paradox
As Deming well understood, organizational problems of this sort often begin at the top. When it comes to the complexities of knowledge management, fresh technologies are being introduced without adequate planning, forethought or understanding.
A middle manager at a well-known U.S. corporation says that to his knowledge senior executives made no effort to review or understand their firm's existing information flow and structure before installing new IT hardware and software. He maintains also that no one--himself and his peers included--was trained in the skills that running an information system requires.
Other missing links include deciding who is to have access to the information the new systems produce, and how to strategically use it. A predictable result is that the company now faces major problems in the operation of the system. Its expensive, highly technologised knowledge management is in disarray.
Database technologies make it possible for organizations to swiftly collect, archive and distribute knowledge (CAD). What they as yet can't do--and where human skills so far are irreplaceable--is intelligently group, analyze and present it (GAP). We may call this the CAD/GAP Paradox. Despite the computer's matchless capacity to store and conduct accurate searches by both theme and word, successful knowledge management still requires a human brain for deep-structure analysis, text-string interrogation and practical review: that is, judgment. Raw data have to be organized and reassembled in usable forms that can be strategically deployed. Only a mind can recognize patterns based on meaning.
Newspapers, Wire Services, Etc.
Fortunately an efficient and successful model lies easily to hand--the modern news association. Wire services, daily papers and TV news operations are all similarly organized because more than a century of experience has taught them the best and most effective methods to swiftly gather, sort, check, formulate and transmit huge chunks of information. The better ones--what the British call "quality papers"--are also very good at spotting trends and providing clear, coherent analyses, the Op-Ed function. This too is a skill data-swamped company's need.
Reorganizing around these objectives and abilities obviously requires a major corporate effort. Achieving effective knowledge management--let's be clear--is not the work of a single day or week. It takes evaluating and introducing new communications technologies, which is the easy part, then defining and setting up appropriate jobs and structures, and finally training personnel in appropriate skills and practices.
These steps are not necessarily sequential; indeed, since they're interdependent, their introduction is likely to be more or less simultaneous. Self-evidently, therefore, effective knowledge management implies a degree of culture change, that is, re-engineering the objectives, values and leadership techniques entrenched by years of habit.
Team Building and Leadership
Like all major corporate change, top management must be fully aligned and committed before further steps can be taken. Anything less almost guarantees failure. Success includes reviewing the existing work and information flow in a company, clearly defining realistic goals and objectives, ensuring that they are communicated to the workforce, and securing overall commitment.
This process is generically explored and dramatized in Egan and Shandler (1996), and more briefly discussed in Egan and Shandler (1994). Aligning top management around a reorganizing effort is not a slight matter and frankly may require several months work.
Once the leaders are in agreement and aligned, a new oversight team, cross-functional and fully empowered, has to be put in place. Members' roles will correspond to the key administrative positions in a newspaper: Managing Editor, Editor, City Editor, and their staffs. Because this is not a newspaper but an information-management initiative, technical people will also be included.
Of course, it's not necessary to use newspaper-style titles; others appropriate and/or consistent with a company's traditions may be chosen. But their responsibilities and tasks are analogous.
Notice that at this initial stage we're not including on the team Copy Editors (who check for accuracy and help to rewrite) or Reporters (the gatherers of the raw news or data). They'll come later, though at this point valuable work can be done preparing them for their subsequent roles by providing training in writing and interviewing skills, accuracy-checking, critical analysis, summarizing, reading for comprehension, and creativity (i.e., making unexpected connections, seeing patterns, etc.).
Accuracy of course is fundamental. Facts and sources must be checked and verified, processes necessarily systematized and ingrained as habits of mind. In the words of one software engineer: "All the work on cycle-time reduction or just-in-time shipping is based on people being confident in the information they receive. As that evolves, you will see usage of these systems explode. The most important thing to stress is that people will only use information if it's accurate. People will say they are EDI capable, but when we look at the information in their data base there are elements left out and information that's not there."
It's the job of the reporters and copy editors to ensure that nothing important is left out and that what's included cam be relied upon. In addition to accuracy, the initial boot-camp training for the troops includes the formulation of a common writing style, with known, shared and understood vocabularies. Formats and procedures must also be regularized. All these aspects are critical for subsequent editing, comprehension and use by others, and of course are basic for archiving and data retrieval. "People need to learn to rework data and learn how it communicates," says a manager. "What I see too often in this business is that people have glossed over understanding by using all sorts of hype words. What does 'seamless integrated information' mean? I'd like to see people return to the use of the English language!"
Also among the reporters--their elite, perhaps--we find the columnists, possibly the most critical of all roles. These folk must be trained in trend analysis, data mining, clear writing and incisive thought, because it's their job finally to make sense of all the rapidly accreting knowledge, information and data. Their job is to read, assimilate, generalize, theorize. What they discern and persuasively express will ultimately determine company strategies, policies and innovations. Top management must be able to depend with absolute trust on their work and ideas.
Yes, It Is A Hierarchy
Notice that what I'm proposing is an extremely hierarchical structure--I have not introduced the military metaphor simply for its "literary" effects. News organizations are top-down structures because that's what an accurate and efficient fact gathering/ analyzing/disseminating operation requires. But of course our model is not the German High Command in Word War II. Fascism failed because it killed initiative and creativity. Our model is closer to that of a citizen's army, where the chain of command is clear but considerable latitude exists at every level. The best journalists are the freest.
One cannot rely on the technology to produce the appropriate discipline. It must be part of the communication team's ethos. As one software engineer expressed it: "You can't use technology to replace discipline, planning, analysis and human-based communication. Technology can help you achieve better planning and better analysis, but can't replace it. You still have to plan and run an operation with discipline and I see companies rushing to new technology as a substitute for planning and discipline."
The training, team building, organizational precision, habits of work and perhaps above all esprit de corps will generate the necessary coherence. But the news organization model provides the paradigm.
References
BusinessWest, August, 1990, p 12
Egan, M., Write Now! Total Quality Writing in the Age of Computers, Stipes Publishing Co., 1993, American Business Press, 1996
Egan, M. And Shandler M., Leadership for Quality, Journal for Quality and Participation, March, 1994, pp. 66-71
Egan, M. And Shandler M., Vroom! Turbocharged Team Buildin, AMACOM, 1996
Fortune, 26 December. 1992
Wordmasters, Boston, MA, 1994a, p. 1
Wordmasters, Boston, MA, 1994b, p. 3
Wordmasters, Boston, MA, 1994c, p. 4
Michael Egan, Ph.D., is an internationally known author, educator and management consultant who has worked in England, South Africa, the USA and Hawai'i. His company, the Technology & Communications Group (http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~mee), based in Narragansett, RI., provides corporate training in business writing, public speaking, team work and leadership. Its mission includes helping companies maximize their investment in Information Technology, improve communications, move to team-based cultures and develop leaders.
Michael has worked with over twenty major corporations, including the MacArthur Foundation, Phillips-Van Heusen, Columbia University, Marriott Hotels and Dow Jones, Inc. He has authored 97 professional articles and eight books, including Write Now! Total Quality Writing in the Age of Computers, Vroom! Turbocharged Team Building, and Would You Really Rather Die Than Give a Talk?
In addition, Michael is a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches business communications. His colleague Amy Zuckerman helped research this article.