Well, this has been my professed view for a long, long while. It gets me into trouble, though. The fact is, the orthodoxy demands that everything have a clear and explicit purpose. Now, in reality, I find that view useful as well – I like paradox and I like the paradox that I can be both onside with this orthodoxy and in plain opposition to it as well. Paradox is powerful (the orthodoxy doesn’t like paradox either – but what the orthodoxy doesn’t know is that it has no part to play in denying paradox because we’ve already absorbed the orthodoxy into the paradox).
So, yes, of course things have a purpose – and the orthodoxy will say that I’m about to prove that. But knowledge artefacts aren’t always like that.
Of course, many knowledge artefacts do have a clear and singular purpose. A procedural guide, for instance, has the clear purpose of allowing someone who doesn’t have all the procedural knowledge in their mind to still be able to follow and execute the procedure. We put the knowledge and experience of the people who do know into the guide just for that reason.
But there’s a different kind of knowledge artefact that is more fundamental and can support many purposes. You may well start it for one in particular, but if you’re onto something fundamental you’d be wise to keep your future options open by not typing the knowledge artefact too much, not optimising it too much for one use case alone, so that it can support future uses: both those you can imagine right now, and also others that will be a complete surprise when they emerge.
So one example of something fundamental is information about people, for example their knowledge, skills and experience. Keeping this kind of information open, flexible, easily extensible and re-usable is the smart bet for getting the most value from it. Just today a brand new requirement arose for which some separate work was about to be done when I quickly saw the chance to re-use a resource I have on people information – and which I quickly extended to meet the new need. I had previously never, ever considered this need arising.
The definition of what are your organisation’s key knowledge subjects and knowledge content types is another fundamental resource that may appear to have a weak case, but in fact can support many potential needs – – including, for example, quite rational needs for statistical information, once you start tagging people, projects, teams, solutions etc by these terms and totting-up what kind of strength you have – – which is a long way from simple library tagging as the sole use case.
You might develop short bios (biographies) of your people with the key purpose of having them for customer project proposals. However, come the day they’re needed for an article, or for a conference programme, or for the CEO to introduce an award recipient (and these are just today’s imagined needs – there will be others not yet imagined), well, you’d be crazy to re-do the work and smart to remember you have this resource and to extend it to also meet these new needs. Yes, each use case may have specific needs that the others don’t, and sometimes this can lead to the users or sponsors in each case to want to diverge and have their own specific solution. But that’s the high maintenance* option that pulls apart synergies. The smart option is to stay together and common.
In that situation I’d say that many times the original sponsor will not want to invest in supporting others’ use cases for the same resource. As knowledge manager, recognising the potential, you have three main choices: [1] try to persuade them or [2] involve others in a bigger project that covers more needs or [3] deliver what they want and take care of the wider opportunity on the quiet yourself. I’ve done all three.
Ultimately knowledge itself just is, rather than is for… although it enables, supports and motivates many, many things.
* The separate solutions will not all be maintained. Guaranteed.
AI4KM - Robert Taylor 