Knowledge debt

I’m not the first to write about “knowledge debt”, inspired, as others have been, by the concept of “technical debt” from the world of IT and, more specifically, originally from software development. The broad concept is the idea of taking short-term shortcuts, which, instead of being resolved (paid off) instead accumulate.

Most of my career I’ve work with, in or close to IT, both in terms of tech itself and IT as a function in organisations. I may be out of date now, but in the noughties I worked with a major IT supplier to banks and financial institutions and all of these customers had core IT systems with some code dating back to the 1970s that had constantly, over the years, been patched and added to tactically to achieve new goals. But none of these projects included the budget – the very big budget – needed to just start again. And so that problem of unwinding matters got ever bigger. A big debt: the cause of additional cost all the time, because of the drag of working with the old code (find a Cobol programmer?) yet still these individual “interest repayments” were at least affordable in each case, whilst the underlying debt grew, and the cumulative payments were huge.

The situation with knowledge and KM is usually very similar, in two main ways besides the case of the IT side of it:

1. The content debt
2. The culture debt

The content debt piece is easy to understand. In an ‘unimproved’/unmanaged situation – which is the norm – it would be unusual to find content well managed. The norm is that content and documents are not labelled (titled), described (tagged) nor sorted and stored in an orderly way. The norm is that documents are not retained or disposed of in any planned way – in fact the norm would be that everything is just kept, and dropped where it was last put, regardless.

Everyone knows this situation is just a drag on everyone’s work, every day, because poor management means poor retrieval, and poor retrieval means work is re-done rather than re-used. Specific projects or specific teams can make inroads into this at different times for different needs – such as developing a well-managed content resource for a team like a sales force – , but, just as in the case of the core banking systems, it’s unusual that anyone ever has the budget, time and resources to sort it all out or just start again. And the cost of doing that sorting out, to an extent that is necessary for process efficiency (rather than in the absolute) is the content debt.

The cultural/behavioural debt side is strongly related to the content debt, but goes further. For a start, we might see the content debt as consisting of a part that is about systems and processes, but, equally, a part that is about culture and behaviours: even if we put in the systems, processes and structures for fit-for-purpose content management (if we paid off that part of the debt) there would still be a dependency on people actually playing the game in order to make it work. Some of this can be designed in, yet some will remain with people and will depend on them having the awareness, motivation, ability and opportunity to make the system work. And the reason I say it’s cultural as well as behavioural is that it is investments in the culture and the society of organisations that enable or inhibit behaviour. For instance, and the purpose of the micro example is to illustrate just how pervasive into the tiny details this can go, if teams have a need to lend and borrow people between them in order to access specific expertise, but the time recording system doesn’t support that in a straightforward way, then there is a drag. Of course this doesn’t mean it wont ever happen, regardless of systems, but it does mean it sometimes wont happen (I’ve been in such conversations in the long past), and it does mean that it will always be a cause of friction.

But I’d like to say that the cultural debt side of knowledge debt goes beyond the ‘soft’, behavioural side of people stewarding content since it pervades all other aspects of KM.

For example, if the organisation doesn’t have the policies and processes, and doesn’t allow people the time, space and legitimacy to do KM things within the framework of the firm, then, what happens is, they do it around, beneath, above and beyond the firm. Either way, the bad news – the plain fact – is that a failure to enable and encourage KM doesn’t avoid the cost. The cost will still be incurred, but it will be paid for in two ways:

1. By inefficiencies in all work. For example, a failure to curate and share knowledge content that everyone needs won’t just be done somewhere, sometime by somebody, but many times, many places and by many people, and differently. True, you avoided any visible cost, but the cost of the hidden factory was likely far greater. You’re paying high interest on your debt.
2. By people working extra hours to fill in the gaps: lunchtimes, evenings, weekends; likely not booked and not charged and so invisible and without a tangible cost, except the loss of goodwill and the impact on wellness and families.

I admit, that, just as in the case of those banking systems, it may not be feasible nor realistic to pay back the knowledge debt all in one go – and I’m not saying otherwise.

What I do think is that we can start to lower the interest payments, bit by bit, by making continuous small improvements to our content management and our cultural space for KM. We can lessen the drag. And maybe we can pay a bit of the principal back each time too, so that, over a small number of years, everything can be renewed.