Making the Enterprise Knowledge Market More Robust

McKinsey was recently promoting some of their classic reports. One of them caught my eye, Making a market in knowledge. This report, produced in 2004, starts with this observation.

“Put simply, there is great value in sharing, across a whole company, proprietary insights into customers, competitors, products, production techniques, emerging research, and the like. In practice, of course, companies find it far more difficult than do individuals to take advantage of all this knowledge. An individual's knowledge is self-contained, always available. But in companies—including small ones—it can be hard to exploit the valuable knowledge in the heads of even a few hundred employees, particularly if they are scattered in different locations. In a large, diverse company, the task expands to cover thousands of highly educated professionals and managers spread across a variety of specialties, locations, even countries. But difficult as it may be to profit from this diffused knowledge, the power that such large-scale interaction yields can dwarf what individuals or small teams, however brilliant or effective, can accomplish.”

I find this well stated and still true. This is our goal at Connectbeam. The authors go to describe three approaches to knowledge management that have not realized their promise. First is "build it and they will come," then there is "take it from the top," and the last is to "let a thousand web sites bloom." They actually say that the last version has been more successful, allowing organization units to solve their own knowledge problems. However, they point out that this only helps the small groups connected to the specialized knowledge and does not address the company-wide knowledge exchanges that are often needed.

The authors then say that rather than trying to management knowledge why not look at it as a market issue. Make the benefits of providing knowledge greater than the cost. Recognition is often the main benefit for knowledge providers within an organization. They suggest increasing the benefits to the knowledge provider. The problem with many traditional approaches to knowledge management is that the cost to the knowledge provider is quite high so then the benefits have to be that much higher. The authors offer a rather elaborate market system to orchestra these exchanges with costs in the millions. Remember this is 2004.

Now in 2008 we can use new capabilities and concepts to combine social bookmarking with social networking and lower the cost of knowledge exchange. What we have attempted to do with Connectbeam is to dramatically reduce the cost of contributing knowledge so there is more universal participation and thus greater benefits for the provider, who gets more recognition, and the user who gets access to a more comprehensive set of knowledge and experts. Instead of contributing knowledge, you simply tag knowledge that is a developed as part of work. Then colleagues can easily see the relevant documents and experts to their knowledge searches. All of the members of the organization and the work they produce become the dynamic knowledge management system. The benefits to the knowledge provider go up with broader recognition just the costs go down, a good market dynamic that should encourage participation. This is what we are finding with our customers.

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