Let me illustrate with riding a bike (a salute to the Tour de France).  I can read all about riding a bike;  I can document lessons learned from anyone on riding a bike;  I can interview people about riding a bike;   I can video people riding bikes, I can even compile best practices for all aspects of riding a bike.  But, in all cases, I do not have direct knowledge of riding a bike, until I experience riding a bike.   After the “knowledge” is captured for someone to see or read, from the perspective of the reader or viewer, it is only information.   To take this one step further, as a new bike rider, I can look at all of these pieces of information and have a greater opportunity of successful bike riding experience. 

So, what we learn about KM from the bike-riding metaphor is that codifying and documenting is not the end goal of knowledge management, but a necessary part of it.  The end goal of KM is very simply to improve performance whether it’s in your personal life or business life.    By providing current information about real experiences, the next person can take that information and incorporate it into their experience so that they can be quicker, more effective, improve quality and generally improve performance.  

P.S.  Some people get hung up on the age old knowledge vs information argument when talking about knowledge management.  What I remind people is that words are just symbols used to approximate an experience, it is not the totality of that experience.  That’s why I have returned over an over to using the term “knowledge management” to include both information and knowledge management.

 Any of these sound familiar?  Content management has become the bane of our business existence.  Supposedly we went from the pain of paper, to a paperless wonderland.  But all we really did was transfer the content hairball from one system to another.  And, when we find the latest and greatest tech tool, we continue to move the content hairball around.   We constantly move from one tool to another , never fixing the underlying structure of the problem…. Garbage in, garbage out!

 How do you get rid of the content hairball?   The reality is you can’t get rid of the content hairball until you do some detangling… something that cuts through the mess…  I call it Content Rationalization .   In other words, do some in-house organizing…. Any Home Organizer will tell you there are some simple steps to organizing your home.  I’ve converted these into simple steps for Content Rationalization for small or large content hairballs….

• Assess – Figure out what you have and where you have it
• Plan – Figure out what you want to have in the end
• Rationalize – Go through everything and organize it all into 3 buckets
  1. Keep
  2. Save for possible future use
  3. Get rid of it
• Organize – Based on what you want to have and what you want to keep, determine the right “system” (based on people, process and technology)
• Sustain – Develop a content management process that everyone can live with that prevents having to do major content rationalization again.

Content Rationalization is a buzzword for organizing your content and getting rid of the “noise” content in your company.  It’s not fun, and it’s not pretty, but you have to do it.  It’s a huge job when you leave it alone and don’t touch it for years.  But, if you invest up front time to do content rationalization and create an on-going process for content management – a cradle to grave process, then your business content landscape becomes much more tolerable and you start eliminating your content hairballs.  And, you won’t say… Why the hell can’t I find it?…