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The Cost of the Data Deluge
 
There's too much technology, there's information overload, and finding answers is next to impossible. Technology is now fighting technology in an escalating global conflict in which increasing amounts of information generates more system and network sales, which in turn enable the creation of even more information - which nobody can find when it really matters.
 
Email is a case in point. There were apparently 900 million electronic mailboxes worldwide at the start of the year, generating billions of messages of dubious content each day, most of which have been 'replied to all' to cover the senders' backs.
 
So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised at estimates suggesting the average UK and American worker now spends at least three hours of each working day reading, writing, and forwarding emails. Or that sales of appliance servers which power email systems grew 166% in revenue terms in 2000. Or even that up to 40% of all email enquiries are never answered.
 
The problem is a computing environment dominated by tech-heads, and a largely American mentality based on the incessant drive towards bigger, better and faster. But movie-quality graphics don't answer complex questions, 10Gbps IP networks can't intelligently offer the most relevant services, and terabytes of storage can't apply past experience to a current problem.
 
In a time when a company's most valuable asset is its knowledge, today's blind emphasis on bandwidth, processing and storage is completely missing the point. As a result, we're now in serious danger of becoming citizens of one almighty technocracy in which knowledge will be a luxury held by the privileged few.
 
It's hard enough already, whether you're a consumer looking for something on the Web, a customer service agent trying to answer a telephone phone query, or a factory manager trying to find out how to re-calibrate an ageing cutter.
 
So what has the technology industry come up with to address these problems? More technology, of course, in the form of search tools, content managers, BI software, data marts and warehouses, portals, intranets and extranets. But these are all geared solely to finding and disseminating information, which may or may not have once been knowledge.
 
Even more curious is that this blanket application of technology which is costing companies billions - over $5 billion will be spent on knowledge management access and infrastructure by 2004, according to IDC - is addressing an environment in which only 20% of all knowledge is in a digital format. Some 26% is based on paper while the vast majority, 46%, is in people's heads. And no software, however mighty its claims, can currently search your brain.
 
The problem is that the technocrats aren't very good at context, and knowledge is all about delivering relevant information to the right person each and every time. If IT had been used from the outset to store and retrieve knowledge, it wouldn't look like it does today, since computers have been and still are about data processing, about shifting buckets of binary code from one disk to another.
 
That's not to say you need to replace everything today to implement a knowledge management environment. Indeed, there are obviously very useful nuggets stored in existing systems. But suggesting that knowledge management can work only if hundreds and thousands of terabytes are stored forever on expensive disk systems deserves the contempt it gets.
 
There's one aspect of today's IT culture that's positively beneficial to knowledge management: the realisation that centralisation is in fact a good thing, manifested in the resurgence of the data centre, a shift to thinner client devices, the growth of corporate portals and emerging electronic software licensing delivery.
 
You can't leverage what people know without a centralised base, bringing together highly dispersed knowledge that provides the basis for intelligent delivery of relevant information to the appropriate people.
 
But it's more than just about timely access. On average, companies have a 10% employee churn rate, which means each time one person leaves that company loses more knowledge representing corporate value. When knowledge is maintained centrally, companies aren't so exposed when valuable individuals decide to leave. Contrast the importance to a company of that to databases, servers, network switches or clickstream analysis software, all commodities that any competitor can implement tomorrow.
 
By definition, commodities sell in large numbers at relatively low prices, which means people want them. So there's no point trying to replace content, search, BI, CRM, data warehouses and all those other commodity applications that are geared towards information delivery. Indeed, these are all complementary to knowledge management, each providing elements of a larger whole that deals with common assets.
 
When EMC's marketing refers to its systems as 'Where information lives', that may be fine if you're looking for sales breakdowns of all known companies over the past nine years. But information isn't the point. Knowledge is the point. Information of itself is virtually worthless to everyone, apart from those who enjoy reciting cricket statistics. It's about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.
 
Knowledge, on the other hand, is information's evolutionary descendant, transcending primitive emphases on hardware, bandwidth and Java compatibility with something much more powerful and sophisticated: individual and collective experience that can be leveraged to benefit virtually any activity.
 
And managing that knowledge represents the next evolutionary leap, bringing together in a virtual repository all knowledge assets regardless of where and how they're physically held. This means not only that all answerable questions can be answered, but it will also push through the realisation that corporate knowledge is a measurable asset that can expanded and enhanced tactically and strategically in just the same way human resources are today.
 
In fact that leap has already happened. It's just a matter of time now before the technology-focused information farmers are trampled under food by the knowledge supply chain.