ABSTRACT

This presentation provides a brief and holistic overview of The Knowledge Economy (aka New World of Business) from the perspective of Knowledge Management (KM) with ancient Zulu lessons, learned from ants. The greatest challenge is balancing Big Data Management with *Data Latency, while fostering a culture of *Best Talent Remixing to continuously hold it all together. Aptly dubbed “wicked”, the new world of business is characterized as dynamic, fast-paced, volatile and unpredictable. This environment has brought heightened challenges and risks to virtually all business industries and organizations.

Herein, the historical progression, from The Information Economy (past) to The Knowledge Economy (present and future), is succinctly outlined. In so doing, common business industry perspectives, paradigms and assumptions, through these ages, are illuminated to assess their alignment with and adaptation to the new world of business.

In positioning Knowledge Management as a guiding principal (Sveiby, 2005) for the wicked environment, proposed frameworks, theories, thoughts and opinions of leading global academic and business experts and prominent institutions, are presented (see References, p 7). Also, implied is the role of the Knowledge Management Strategist in assisting organizations to not only reengineer their culture towards sustained access to business intelligence (“knowledge”), but also gain and sustain industry leadership while reducing costs.

*Notes: Data Latency refers to data delay within a system and its impact on the window of time data is most valuable, applicable and relevant.Best Talent Remixing – think…ants and termites and refer to Zulu Storytelling where the ant and the termite are championed as the worlds most intelligent and dexterous team workers and engineers/problems solvers.

Follow the Ants: The Knowledge Economy & Big Data Management:A Perspective on Knowledge Management in Response to the “Wicked Environment”

According to the premise of strategic planning, the world is supposed to hold still while a plan is being developed and then stay on the predicated course while that plan is being implemented. - Henry Minzberg, 1994

© Zola Dube – Revised January 2013

Past State - “The Stable Environment”: The Information Economy

Past State, driven by business environment characterized by…• Long periods of stability• Small, incremental change• Predictable future

As a result…• Strategists applied economic theories based on science and mathematics;

suited for the static, one-dimensional and routine business environment• Optimization was based on prediction, allowing pre-specified plans and goals• Business decisions were based on consensus, convergence and compliance• Products and services (including core deliverables) had long, multi-year life • Industry boundaries were explicit over the foreseeable future

Led to Corporate Information Systems (including related performance and control systems) that were...

• Modeled after relatively predictable environment • Characterized by reutilization of organizational goals were built into formal

and informal information systems for increased efficiencies • Designed in a manner that convergence was enabled through adherence to

organizational routines

It sought to establish universally and timelessly valid laws governing reality.

– George Soros, 2012

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Present State - “The Wicked Environment”:The Knowledge Economy

…90 percent of business leaders now view big data in the same critical category as land, labor and capital. More than two-thirds of North American executives (168 of the survey's 600 global respondents) indicated that their organizations must address big data issues in order to improve decision making. At present, 44 percent say that the volume of data and inability to manage it effectively has slowed decision making. - Samuel Greengard, 2012

Present State, driven by business environment characterized by…• Interruption of stability• Radical, unforeseen, discontinuous change• Unpredictable future

As a result…• Business risks and challenges have heightened and hold potential to fundamentally

alter any industry• Previous business paradigms and strategies suited for static, one-dimensional

environment, no longer meet the challenges of new, fast-paced, dynamic and multi-dimensional environment

• Knowledge perceived as collection of information, has resulted in greater spend on technology, including “knowledge management software”

Leading to Corporate Information Systems that are…• Inefficient and fragmented• Unable to extract and aggregate accurate, quality data• A continuous drain on time and resources due to manual processes; for example,

gathering results across portfolios and businesses

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Future State – “Adaptation to The New Environment”: The Knowledge Economy

Future State, driven by business environment characterized by…• Culture of Knowledge Management:

• Create sustainable, flexible and robust response activities and processes, to adapt to and absorb shocks of the wicked environment

• Open Innovation Philosophy (challenge assumptions and avoid dangers of group-think): • Appropriate architecture for real-time, formal and informal virtual forums • Global, Cross-Functional Teams (silos removed) - “no boarders” nor job level restrictions • Share, create, renew and discard knowledge for actionable usage (view business as “living

ecosystem”)

As a result…• Growing shift from viewing human resources as employees to “knowledge workers”; identifying,

recruiting, retaining and empowering the best and the brightest • Precognition and adaptation (less surprises and ad-hoc fixes)

Leading to Corporate Information Systems that are…• Realigned

• Knowledge worker activities dictate information systems framework and IT investment decisions • Support knowledge worker interaction towards breaking new ground in innovation, creativity and

new solutions, resulting in business intelligence, competitive advantage and industry leadership

To conceive of knowledge as a collection of information seems to rob the concept of all of its life... Knowledge resides in the user and not in the collection. It is how the user reacts to a collection of information that matters. C West Churchman, 1971

Even an ant can hurt an elephant. – Zulu Proverb

…after the IT euphoria descended into disarray and the IT solutions did not fulfill the promises… We now see more human-oriented solutions emerging and I am becoming quite optimistic. - Karl-Erik Sveiby, 2003

If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. – Zulu Proverb

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Corporate Data Legacy and Big Data (aka “digital exhaust data”): A good investment, after all. You can expect to find diamonds in the rough of Big Data. KM Applied to Complexity Theory and Big Data Analytics

Other Areas to Explore:Theories & Frameworks for KM Focused Team Projects

(Long-term and Short-term)

Scenarios contain the stories of these multiple futures, from the expected to the wildcard, in forms that are analytically coherent and imaginatively engaging. A good scenario grabs us by the collar and says, ‘‘Take a good look at this future. This could be your future. Are you going to be ready?’’ - Peter Bishop, Andy Hines and Terry Collins, 2007

Process Improvement: The wicked environment is also a risk-based environment. The process that works best is one that is planned using a framework that can shift and provide multiple plausible, real world futures.KM Applied to Scenario-Based Development

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[Big Data Analytics] Sophisticated modeling and visualization tools… will soon provide greater business value than ever before. But that does not mean that spreadsheets and charts should go away. On the contrary: New tools should supplement earlier ones or continue to be used side by side as needed. That lesson applies to nearly every way that analytics capabilities should be nurtured as an organization becomes more ambitious about becoming [knowledge] driven: The process needs to be additive. - LaValle, Lesser, Shockley, Hopkins, Kruschwitz, 2010

[Complexity Theory] The approach taken… argues for a deeper understanding of complex systems by looking at several characteristics and by building a rich inter-related picture of a complex social system. It is this deeper insight that will allow strategists to develop better strategies and organisational designers to facilitate the creation of organizational forms that will be sustainable in a constantly changing environment.- Eve Mitleton-Kelly, 2003

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“Knowledge Management caters to the critical issues of organizational adaptation, survival, and competence in face of increasingly discontinuous environmental change.... Essentially, it embodies organizational processes that seek synergistic combination of data and information processing capacity of information technologies, and the creative and innovative capacity of human beings. “

- Dr. Yogesh Malhotra, 2005

In Closing: Defining Knowledge Management

“Personally, I dislike the notion ‘Knowledge Management’. Knowledge is a human faculty, not something that can be ‘managed’, except by the individual him/herself. A better guidance for our thinking is therefore phrases such as ‘to be Knowledge Focused’ or to ‘see’ the world from a ‘Knowledge Perspective’. To me Knowledge Management is: The Art of Creating Value from Intangible Assets.”

- Dr. Karl-Erik Sveiby, 2005

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“Unfortunately, there's no universal definition of KM, just as there's no agreement as to what constitutes knowledge in the first place… Succinctly put, KM is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. Most often, generating value from such assets involves sharing them among employees, departments ...”

-Megan Santosus and Jon Surmacz, 2005

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Mintzberg, Henry (1994). The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning. Harvard Business Review. 72, pp 107-114.

Soros, George (2012): Bookmarks at the Festival of Economics, Trento Italy. In: GeorgeSoros.com. Retrieved 08 March 2012.

Greengard, Samuel (2012) Business Intelligence. Big Data Challenges Organizations. In: baselinemag.com. Retrieved 14 March 2013

Churchman, C. West (1971). The Design of Inquiring Systems: Basic Concepts of Systems and Organization. Basic Books Publishing, New York. pp 3-18.

Sveiby, Karl-Erik (2003). An interview with Karl-Erik Sveiby. In: EmeraldInsight.com. Retrieved 08 March 2012.

Brown, S. L. and Eisenhardt, K. M. (1997). The Art of Continuous Change: Linking Complexity Theory and Time-based Evolution in Relentlessly Shifting Organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 42, pp 1-34.

Mitleton-Kelly, Eve (2003). Ten Principles of Complexity & Enabling Infrastructures. Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives on Organisations: The Application of Complexity Theory to Organisations. pp 23-50

LaValle, Steve. Lesser, Eric. Shockley, Rebecca. Hopkins, Michael S. Kruschwitz, Nina (2010): The New Intelligence Enterprise. In: MIT Sloan Management Review. Retrieved 08 April 2013

Bishop, Peter and Hines, Andy and Collins, Terry (2007). The Current State of Scenario Development: An Overview of Techniques. Foresight, 9, pp 5-25.

Wilson, Amy (2005). Knowledge Management: Integrating and Sharing Research Data Beyond Development. APRA International Conference, Columbia College, Chicago. p 11, p 18, p 12.

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References

Contact

Zola Dube, Knowledge Management StrategistEmail: zoladube@gmail.com