Gudjon’s Blog

Knowledge management, corporate culture and all forms of increased productivity have interested me greatly for years. I think these themes are some of my core driving forces when it comes to my interest in executing new ideas with talented people.

Industria is a knowledge-based company that builds its value on the competence of the company’s talent. Therefore, knowledge is one of the company’s primary assets.

There is quite a lot of information floating around the office environment that can be called information items. These can be anything from a discussion in the canteen, to email communications, discussions at meetings and so forth. But these information items only have short-term value for both you as an individual and the company.

A key goal for each employee at Industria is to transform these numerous knowledge items into knowledge assets. A knowledge asset is something that has a long-term value for all employees and the company as a whole. The reason for its increased value is because it has been stored in the ‘corporate memory‘ and therefore has changed from being just an information item into a knowledge asset.

Corporate memory

Industria is using a Wiki system as its corporate memory. This means that all knowledge assets are being stored as wiki pages. These can be anything from meeting minutes, whitepapers, solution documentation, policy or other forms of knowledge. Wiki pages are simple to create and very easy to manage. Wiki pages are very accessible and easily searchable. This simplicity and usability of the Wiki are very important and really make the difference in turning information items into knowledge assets.

Recollecting our thoughts

As time goes by and Industria’s memory expands, it becomes increasingly important to be able to recollect our thoughts quickly. Searching for documents on the wiki is just as easy as using Google, since you can search for specific types of information within a specified time range or only for information that has been tagged specifically. Furthermore, the wiki search engine also searches within PowerPoint, PDF and Word attachments.

Why are knowledge assets important?

Knowledge assets are important for Industria because we need to know what has worked well and what has not, in order to be able to learn from our experience. How we do things today and tomorrow needs to be reflected by our experience. We know that companies tend to make the same mistakes over and over again; maybe the reason is that companies have not been able to remember what they did wrong when relying on short term memory (information items).

Benefits of using Wiki as the Corporate Memory

• Improved Accessibility: Single-user “desktop” tools like Microsoft Word are not recommended for writing up documents like meeting minutes, policy documents, solution documentation, technology analysis or whitepapers. The reason is that in most cases we are writing documents we want to share with our colleagues and for this purpose using our wiki, creating knowledge assets, is the way to go. However there are always some documents we write only for our selves, e.g. memos or action items, but we need to think if others would benefit from being able to access the information and, if so, to use the Wiki. By standardizing, i.e. creating simple wiki pages rather than writing up Microsoft Word documents, the accessibility to the content has been improved. There is a saying in the world of usability design that with every extra mouse click the user need to make you loose half of your audience. This is the same for information management.

• Reduced Complexity with More Effective Organization: The primary rule of good information management is to never duplicate data, rather use a single centralized stored version of the data. If and when the data needs to be shared with colleagues, a link pointing to the data can be sent on email or by other communication means - not a copy of that data in a form of attachment on email. (We don’t want to build a mental illness like schizophrenia in our corporate memory!)

• Reduced Use of Email: A very important reason for standardizing work by using a single wiki for storage, is to minimize the use of the email Inbox. Email can cause a lot of distraction and introduce chaos. When documents are sent as attachments on email, these documents are being duplicated in everyone’s email. By using wiki, your email Inbox will not be used as a document storage system and therefore it will lower dramatically the amount of daily emails in your inbox. When all members of the team exploit this methodology the benefit will be substantial and the amount of daily email in all our inbox will thankfully go down. This will make each of us more organized and we will gain more productive time out of a normal working day.

• Accurate Version Control: Another benefit is that it will be so much easier to look up the last updated version of the data, as it is only stored in a single instance centrally within the corporate memory. At the same time, Wiki provides seamless and powerful version control so that you can revert to any of the former versions at any time.

A concrete example

Imagine you send out project meeting minutes in a Word document as an attachment to 10 people on email. It is quite likely that only 5 will make the extra clicks to open up the attachment, as you have introduced one more complexity factor by concealing your data in an attachment. As you send it out on email that means it will have a low lifespan, as some messages simply get lost in all the email flood of unorganized teams. In addition, it will be very difficult for a new member of the team to come up to speed on the project, as the new member will not be able to access other members’ email inboxes to review previous project meeting minutes!

The right way to do this is to write up the meeting minutes as a wiki page, carefully located at the right place within the overall hierarchy in the wiki. After the page has been saved, you can send your colleagues a link to the page so they can visit it at a time convenient for them. Most often, they will not go there straight away as they just know it’s there and has been written. At the right time for them, the meeting minutes can be visited and read in addition to all the other relevant meeting minutes stored at the same location within the corporate memory. New team members can also be invited to join in and get updated on current and past meeting minutes.

Example summary

The meeting minutes summary has been added in the corporate memory and is now an asset for all stakeholders. Additionally, your colleague’s email inbox has been rescued from storing duplicated data.

The same applies for all information items, including company phone book, policies, project contacts, solution documentation, risk registry, proposals plus all the bits and pieces of project documents.

Wrapping up

Personally, I strive to build up knowledge and store information bits this way, equally for my personal and company related documentation.

As an example, my personal pictures are all securely stored at Flickr, my music library is backed-up using SugarSync, all my documents and notes are stored within my company’s wiki system and so on. My address book is synchronized using .Mac between my iPhone and my MacBook, while my email and calendar are stored and synchronized at Google Apps Premier. I can even leverage tools like Facebook for keeping in touch with my friends, as I never know where in the world I will be next week.

The network is the computer and this computer of mine has a mammoth secure storage. Meaning that if I loose my laptop, all my data will be just at the other end of the wire.

“Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL?”

The next phenomenon will definitely be in connecting all this information and making it work for you. This will be achieved by means of Semantic Web technologies, although it will require us to describe our knowledge items in more detail so that our information system can “understand” them. This means that a true knowledge asset in the future will be described in a language understood by the Semantic Web.

Isn’t the future exciting? ;-)