One of the distinctions between information and knowledge that typically gets made is that while information is simply organized and structured data, knowledge is about putting information into a decision or action context. Where does that distinction lead us if we think about the recent disasters at Enron and World-Com from an information vs knowledge management perspective?

Accounting and information systems perpetuate the myth that "the numbers speak for themselves." What we've seen recently is that if they do, most of us don't speak the language. To some extent, their obscurity is created by deliberately separating the information from its context and by hiding pieces of the puzzle in multiple locations. Even without bad intentions, most information systems in organizations depend on an implicit shared context if we are to make sense out of them.

Suppose for a moment that you had an organization where all the key players kept running diaries of the discussion and debate that accompanied their decisions. Suppose further that these diaries were a matter of record (at least within the organization). In other words, everyone kept a k-log.

How hard would it be for that organization to lie? To fool itself? I pose this not as a moral question, but as a pragmatic one. Along the lines of Mark Twain's observation that "if you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything."

Granted we live in a world where I would be reluctant to have to rely simply on memory (I'm partial to Cory Doctorow's notion of an outboard brain, or the notion of a personal km strategy). But the notion of a contemporaneous, narrative, account of "what were they thinking?" has many benefits, not the least of which is the near impossibility of maintaining it in parallel with carrying out the kinds of manipulations that appear to have been carried out at Enron and WorldCom.

My last question for the day is whether this line of thinking means that k-logs or more or less likely to take root in existing organizations. Will the presence of an active k-logging environment become an important criterion for evaluating an organization?

10:46:54 PM •  • comment