Knowledge Management, Collaboration and Search-Based Applications

I was reading the latest issue of Scientific American and came across an article titled “Why Germany Still Makes Things.”  The data is fascinating.  German workers are among the highest paid in the world.  They earn 10 times their counterparts in China.  Germany has a jobless rate of 5.6% compared with the US rate of 8.2%

The difference is in how knowledge is transferred from the university and leveraged on the factory floor.   A BMW project manager is quoted as saying “The knowledge we have in bringing all of these elements together isn’t something our competitors can easily copy.” From carbon composites to advanced robotic automation for micro assembly, next generation automobiles are being designed with ground breaking techniques that will slash production costs.

Innovation and practical application of research to manufacturing happens through numerous public/private partnerships between Universities and government research labs and businesses that use the technology in their products and processes. One partnership, the Fraunhofer Society, is a market-driven network of sixty technology centers that moves technology to its commercial partners.

The US is funding a network modeled after the Fraunhofer Society – the $1b National Network for Manufacturing Innovation.  This will be a Public/Private partnership of fifteen technology centers throughout the country .

What will enable knowledge sharing and collaboration throughout this information ecosystem? Certainly people and their relationships will be key to knowledge sharing.  But, we have found that every state-of-the-art technology-based manufacturing organization has is a series of knowledge-sharing and access mechanisms that build upon core principles in library science.  

Oh sure you’re saying, “To a man with a hammer, everything is a nail”… But this is not a self-serving observation.  It is the way of the world, of the economy, of nature .

Knowledge is a self-organizing system.  What that means is that I don’t know what the ultimate end use of a piece of information will be.  But, if I put a label on it and hold it up in the air for others to see, someone will look at that and say “wow, cool, I can use that…”   By making information discoverable with metadata and with term occurrences, we can allow others to discover and recombine that information for their own purposes.

In fact, that is what is happening now with this article.  I don’t know who is using it or how they are using it.  It never ceases to fascinate me how and where our insights are used.  There are countless organizations and groups that stumble across our ideas who put them in to use.  People who I may never know about or hear of.  But the information is out there.  They discover the information through a variety of mechanisms.  Someone may have come across this note through our newsletter.  They found it because Earley & Associates may be known for interesting ideas in this space, or because they were intrigued by the pithy title to the article.  Or by the occurrence of key terms and phrases in the body or by categories in the posting itself.   

The key here is that structuring content in a library of some sort (this is in a blog and in our newsletter and is tagged) will improve the likelihood that someone will discover and use it. Metadata plays a critical role in providing relevancy “signals”, and consequently, increasing the rate at which knowledge can move within and between organizations.

Every organization can benefit from speeding up its “information metabolism.” One way to do this is through search-based applications. Search-based applications actively present relevant content in the context of a user’s needs.  Search-based applications leverage content models – the structure of information – along with process steps to help shift back and forth between search and browse functions.   

Search-based applications represent an important new approach to knowledge-management.  Organizing and tagging content is the foundation for this important class of applications.  So, not coincidentally, I am at KM World 2012 this week. I am speaking about search-based applications, about SharePoint, about information architecture and about taxonomy.

These are important themes for our customers, more and more of whom are leveraging our capabilities to deliver significant knowledge-access solutions to their employees.  You can learn more about this key trend at our November webinars on The Power of Search-Based Applications.  Hope to see you there.