Lorraine said: Don't we see a lot of this in various organizations? What happens is that various individuals are officially or unofficially charged with the task of making sense of a plethora of information available on the Internet, of transforming it into knowledge they believe (or at least suspect) will be useful to others charged with the task of making judgments/decisions within their organizations? Perhaps we have a lot of people serving as online facilitators for their offline workgroups or special interest groups, without even seeing that that is what they are doing? How does this present an opportunity to those who *are aware of and practising the role of online facilitation?

Lorraine:

You are correct that the issues of knowledge are applicable to all organisations and not only this Indian community case. The issue of knowledge management is one which is getting (quite justifiably) a lot of attention. I have a slightly different view on knowledge management to that of the majority of practitioners.

Most "knowledge" experts and consultants spend a lot of time (again quite justifiably) talking about how to capture and disseminate knowledge. This is valuable and important, but what if the Knowledge being channelled is not of value or doesn't justify the time and effort in its capture and management?

I argue that organisations must start with the core deliverable or outcomes that their organisation is meant to deliver and then ask the question: "what decisions do we need to make in order to deliver those outcomes" which leads to the next key question "what information/knowledge do we need to have in order to make those decisions". This will enable an organisation to "only" collect that knowledge/information that is critical to outcomes. The knowledge process then becomes an integral part of an organisation's (and peoples') decision making process and its quality becomes the fabric of an organisation's intelligence.

If you apply this rigour to the knowledge management process and content, then I suspect that one will find a number of things, namely:

a. some critical knowledge/information is not being collected

b. much knowledge/information being collected isn't critical to organisational outcomes

c. the cost of collecting "unnecessary knowledge" is substantial and represents a wasted organisational resource.

d. the cost of collecting information/knowledge needed but not collected is not insignificant

e. an organisation whose critical knowledge/information is primarily internally-generated will be different in character and structure to an organisation whose critical knowledge/information is largely externally-generated