Competitive Intelligence Marketplace

Knowledge Tense

Richard Marrs posts about his presentation with Steve Barth at KM World 2007. (FYI, you can download a PDF of their presentation from his blog).  Here's an interesting excerpt from their thoughts about "knowledge tense":

It occurred to us that most "knowledge" considered by knowledge managers and their organizations is past based knowledge - tacit, implicit and explicit. And, this is where most KM efforts are focused around codification (excessive in most cases) into repositories with attendant taxonomies, ontologies, etc. This really begs the question of knowledge creation/generation in the moment, as we find in innovation processes, and how that should be facilitated. And if we consider that strategy is developed and strategic decisions are made in the present from anticipated futures, then there is a set of future based knowledge being used in the process.

Some working definitions of knowledge tenses:

· Past Tense = tacit, implicit & explicit,

· Present Tense = inquiry & discovery, and

· Future Tense = possible, plausible, probable.

Knowledge Management

Economist Intelligence Unit has published a white paper with the results of a survey that measures the importance of knowledge management for competitive advantage.

You can read the white paper here. (PDF)

Here's a couple of excerpts from the executive summary:

● Information is everywhere, but knowledge is hard to come by. Two-thirds of firms in the survey complain that, while their IT systems generate huge volumes of data, they struggle to turn this into information they can act on. Too much information, and the fact that a lot of it isn’t accurate or reliable,
are cited as two major impediments to effective decision-making by firms in our survey. An even bigger problem, according to 55% of executives, is that
information is not adequately prioritised.

Knowledge management has become the top priority for strategic IT. Almost two-thirds of executives in the survey believe that knowledge management and business intelligence tools will be the most important technology underpinning their company’s goals over the next three years.