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IT's connectivity, speed of access and storage
of information offer excellent value for knowledge utilization. However, IT has
yet to make an impact on the ability of organisations to take better decisions
or adapt to the environment. Andy Grove, Chairman of Intel, has explained the
anomaly: "When it comes down to the bulk of knowledge work, the 21st
century works the same as the 20th century. You can reach people around the
clock, but they won't think any better or any faster just because you've
reached them faster. The give and take remains a limiting factor".
In another quote, remarkable for its brevity,
Grove drives home the urgency for developing the Give&Take, by IT or any
means, to organise a satisfactory response to change: "Adapt or
die".
The Give&Take
critical for success takes place in evaluation of facts, strategy formulation,
making choices, innovative problem solving, perspective exchange, etc.
Personnel usually conduct these interactive processes by forwarding an issue to
selected collaborators with a spontaneous opinion and expectation. It is likely
that a means to organise
and assist personnel to exchange knowledge in context, reflect, control downstream action and share responsibility shall
improve the Give&Take. Ray Ozzie, the pioneer of
IT groupware, has focused on technology for more expressive interaction, not
the Give&Take process. He bypasses the prime Give&Take need of perceiving reality with: "People
work best when they can 'self-organize' cooperating spontaneously in free-form
ways". As a result, a conventional wisdom has developed that IT
cannot manage the chaos of the interactive processes. The poor work experience
explains the abysmal
response to Knowledge Management (KM) programs for improving and capturing
the Give&Take with IT. Personnel are left free to
Give and to Take without protection from wishful thinking or pre-occupation or memory
lapses, which undermine judgment.
We have developed intelligence from the evolution of team-work to re-write the
conventional wisdom. It powers a smart
interface for organising and anticipating the decision-maker (instead of
the process). It drives a Knowledge Mechanism to
effortlessly conduct, anytime and anywhere, all the interactive processes.
Their conduct is reduced to the simple selection of alternatives, the
core-competence of IT, in a step-by-step procedure.
The interface also harnesses robust replication
technology with precise logic to deliver comprehensive and clear intranet and
offline communication. Today, IT's intranet infrastructure does not offer a
sound alternative to email for coordinating unpredictable workflows. The
self-organization required by email is the main
cause for poor Give&Take. Our means for business communication, an amalgam of
communication, collaboration, coordination, Document and Performance
Management, confines email to its true purpose: personal communication.
Knowledge exploitation has not improved since
the phone debuted in 1876. The intelligence
harnesses IT to create a marvelous way of working
that assures adoption. Personnel self-interest, like
peer-recognition and reduced anxiety, is released from the constraints of
self-organisation to drive the capture, flow and leveraging of knowledge. Effective
Communities Of Practice are created for the development of
collective intelligence. This raises the quality of
judgments and productivity of knowledge work. It also answers Drucker: "The most
important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th
century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in
manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the
21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and
the knowledge worker."
Results
delivered by our architecture prototype at prestigious sites indicate
enterprise performance improvement in excess of 25% is likely.
The effectiveness of experts in particular is
enhanced. The organization is released from the onus of sustaining Knowledge Management,
with all its complex mechanics, and can focus on
maturing the culture for success.