Knowledge Works at the Velocity of Light

I wrote this article sometime back in August 2005.

I copied and paste it from my long forgotten blog with url: knowledgewerks.blogspot.com

I find this relevant to my discourse about Paperless Society. Why? Because I say so.....


Here you go:

Introduction

Electronic documents, paper-based records and journals, emails, images, voice and video recordings are today’s most critical sources of actionable information. They are assets scattered around your company, your employees’ drawers, mail boxes, shared folders, Internet, PDA’s and even hand phones. How to get into those drawers without your employee accusing you of lurking into her privacy or even if you succeed in surreptitiously capturing her hidden knowledge, understanding its context and transforming it into useful and actionable information for your particular use is definitely another challenge.

Even documents that reside in shared folders can get lost physically, or lose in its context simply because the meaning attached to it may no longer be understood in the same level of thinking when it was first created – the event that triggers the creation of such information is incomprehensible in the current applicable context (a natural barrier to knowledge acquisition and transfer).

Explicit knowledge can travel at the speed of light into your thoughts and echoes on into the company’s boardroom swift and easy.

But for that to happen and to achieve such feat, the company’s organizational memory must be designed and organized in such a way that the mechanical components that exist in between the automation boundaries must be mitigated if not totally eliminated.

Designing and managing organizational memory (explicit knowledge) requires six areas to work on:

How you manage your electronic documents
How you manage your emails
How you manage the information you retrieved from the web.
How you manage your existing communities of practice and workgroups.
How you manage your “hard-copy” records, journals and legal documents; and
How you manage and integrate the above into your evolving and ever-changing business workflows.

Organizational memory can be compared to a computer’s critical component called RAM. Bytes of information travel at gigahertz speed or nanoseconds. But once, the data goes into the computer’s hard disk, the speed slows down significantly. Why? Hard disks are mechanical parts of the computer and all mechanical objects are subject to the laws of physics (friction, gravity, force, surface tension, etc). RAM chips are pure semiconductor components of the computer – no moving mechanical component so that bits and bytes of information travel at light speed.

Organizational memory is the RAM chips of an organization. But like any other RAM chips it needs the right INPUT in a well designed and categorized manner, a logical stream of processing such input (pass through work flows, business logic, algorithms etc), in order to produce desired OUTPUT instantly.

An individual is said to have achieved unconscious competence in doing certain job, if the thought processes and judgment calls linked to the mechanical parts of his body such as his hands and feet can move swiftly in a coordinated fashion and achieve the desired output in no time at all. If he spends more time thinking, doing disorganized memory recall, organize his thoughts, dig information from all over the place, learn and digest it before making a decision and deliver the output, that means he hasn’t achieve such level of competence.

Similarly, gigabytes of valuable information are created everyday and travels across the organization through your network, and goes into your mail boxes, personal and/or shared folders, databases, in the same way that physical records, journals and legal documents goes into your desks, and deposited into the store room until they may finally go to garbage bin, and when these information are needed, you spend time thinking on how and where you stored them in your shared folders, inbox, outbox, databases, etc. Then, once you found them you spend another hours figuring out how to make use of such information to get on with the task or issue at hand.

Failure to know what you already know is even worst, your company does not know what it already knows and keeps on reinventing old wheels. Opportunities vaporize quickly just because vital information required for decision-making is not available on a timely manner. They exist in the storage area but you don’t know that they are just there.

The worst case scenario is: current daily procedures and workflows are so dynamic, keep on changing depending on business needs, and threatened by uncertainties surrounding the business environment including external factors such as compliance with government new legislation and regulations, company mergers and acquisitions. The disturbance in existing workflows and business processes and changes in corporate standards are chaos that always impacts the organizational memory. Documents and records changes in form, substance and template from time to time and stored somewhere in the never known drives and lost its meaning, this includes employee turnovers and the knowledge that goes with them.

Managing change in the business landscape, processes, procedures and workflows while at the same time managing the company’s vital sources of knowledge assets requires a powerful document management and workflow system integrated tool to help you organize and design your collective thinking process.

Such software tool helps you manages ad-hoc and complex workflows at all levels of the organization including company standards and management reporting procedures optimizing the company’s organizational memory by minimizing if not eliminating the slow and redundant mechanical touch points.

The following are two of the most powerful workflow-integrated design concepts for organizational memory that supports knowledge-intensive work processes.

Designing Event-Driven Distributed Execution Workflow Engine

Managing events/activities as they unfold right into your organization is one of the priority areas where knowledge works can be made to flow at the speed of light.

The advantage is two-folds, (1) events define the context in which knowledge is created, captured, and used, thus, by linking the vital information with the event that triggers its creation you are assured that it will never lose its context wherever such knowledge may have been stored, archived and retrieve for knowledge re-use, and (2) events have no meaning other than the meaning that we choose to give it, thus, imagine an organization that does not agree on the interpretation of every event that unfold right before its eyes – the result is chaos and confusion at the ground level. A well-designed event-driven distributed execution workflow will minimize if not eliminate the occurrence of such an unfortunate scenario because the engine clearly defines a set of records-linked activities for every workflow.

Every interesting situation or surprises that occur in an organization can be classified either as threat or an opportunity to the business. Such situation can be expressed as event that can trigger either an ad hoc or complex workflow. The distributed workflow can be designed so that the operation of all the component systems including processing entities can react swiftly, concurrently, and decisively to event occurrences.

Further, the document management capability of the workflow system ensures that every electronic document, physical records, databases, web-published documents, competitor information and government issuances, and digital images, including emails are created, captured, filtered, categorized, stored and destroyed or archived in a time-definite manner. Organization need not reinvent old wheels if such event recurs because its historical antecedents are available in real time mode.

Lessons are learned so an organization can avoid repeating the same mistake over and over again. Best practices are modeled (as opposed to being imitated), as they are re-echoed in every corner of the organizational memory.

The conceptual model and detailed design of the distributed execution workflow engine depends entirely on the nature of the company’s knowledge-intensive business processes and activities.


Designing Federated Execution Workflow Engine

Whilst event-driven distributed execution workflow engine works internally within the organization- managing the smooth execution of workflow that is triggered by internal/external events; federated workflow engine provides extension to the outside world - a framework for managing open innovation and integration with the customers especially in the “e” sphere. The key objective is to integrate and develop a solid handshake with customers without necessarily cannibalizing existing core application systems, i.e. to provide another layer of integration using collaborative workflow engine.

Achieving cost leadership is the main focus of event-driven distributed execution workflow engine guarding the business against threats of increasing cost while always looking at the opportunity to reduce cost.

The main focus of federated execution workflow engine, on the other hand, is to achieve product/services differentiation and/or push for innovative customer integration through e-business, tracking and capturing customer knowledge at every event execution.

The key in designing federated execution workflow engine is to be able to document and track down customer knowledge assets by product line or market segment and identify key influencers. The workflow engine defines the events on how you acquire, retain, grow, migrate, or even how you have lost existing customers – each event defines a certain role required to act decisively based on available real-time information.

You retain existing customers and acquire more by attracting them to co-design and co-create collaborative platform that opens the door for the company to obtain and capture customer knowledge and make them accessible across the enterprise (a federated workflow layer just above your existing core applications and your customer’s application systems).

Mass customization of products/services through configuration management, integration with customer’s existing products/services and collaboration with ancillary services are ground breaking technological innovation that presents unlimited opportunity to the business. A complete and integrated document management, records management, emails management and workflow management solutions necessary to elevate your business to the next level of competition.

Conclusion

Knowledge is situated in the activities of people. You cannot simply gather all the documents in your company and put them all in a repository without losing their contexts, in the same way that a particular activity cannot be interpreted in isolation without having to refer and relate it to other events or activities that came before it. It is only by linking information to the activity that triggers its creation and tracking it through the workflow engine that you preserve its context and enables knowledge to travel through the organizational memory at light speed.

Designing organizational memory using integrated workflow with document management system software requires the following criteria for success:

1. It must be driven by business process reengineering and/or continuous improvement, and innovative use of technology.

2. It must have both end-user and management buy-in. Project implementation using proven methodology such as the Six Sigma quality management program/problem solving methodology is the best approach to any knowledge management initiatives.

3. Must impact bottom-line value such as productivity improvement, cost savings, increase revenues, product enhancements, improved customer service, and quality of service.

Knowledge is actionable information. Information sources such as documents, physical records, databases, emails, web-published materials and informal group discussions must be captured and stored in the organizational memory along with the events the triggered its creation and re-use.

The second generation of KM initiatives now focuses on workflow engines as a way to reduce the stickiness of knowledge in business processes thereby enabling knowledge to flow across the organization just as RAM chips operates at light speed.
This trend in KM initiatives defines the next level of competition that rests in the ability of global companies to implement workflow execution models in all their branches worldwide simultaneously and synchronously.