It's People Who Manage Knowledge - Not Computers!

Gerard Fit zions works as a senior consultant for Hay McBer, which is a global management consultancy specialising in people, performance and work. In this article, he argues for a balanced view of Information Management, urging five Managers to take a commonsense approach and bring back the human element to business. Knowledge is power. That may be absolutely right and it is true to say that unless organisations manage the information that they have, then they are missing opportunities to grow and develop. The superinformation highway, home and office intemet connections and schools' access to the National Grid for Learning mean that billions of pieces of information can be downloaded, saved, printed or memorised every day. In response to this, Management Consultandes like mine have established Executive Coaching Practices to help over-informationed executives cope with the stress of information overload. If you don't believe the need for this exists, think about how often we have returned from holiday to hear a colleague say that they spent two or three days going through their e-mails and deleting most of them. Especially the ones marked with a priority and confidentiality label informing them that the toilets on the sixth floor would be unserviceable for the day due to the fact that the plumbers were conducting an investigation into the blockage - which in turn had been reported bye-mail! What is it that they say about wood and trees? There must be some way through this fog of information. It is now common for global organisations to have a Director or Manager of Information or Knowledge-what a tough job! Is it possible for one person to derive a system or structure which will truly help us sift the wheat from the chaff? Large computer software houses have produced all sorts of knowledge information software to help us sort out the crucial from the important from the mundane from the "why the heck do I need to know this? " These packages have different histories of success. Whatever software packages we use, we all need to take time to decide the information that we actually need. While the Internet is a fabulous means of gathering information, there is an awful danger that when using it we simply get sucked into the quagmire of connecting to another link, then another and then another- well we did think it was interesting to pursue that link to that University in Iowa - you never know, that might be just the place to find that vital piece of information we've been searching for these last few weeks! Alternatively, it might be that the Iowa investigation has taken two or three hours and really didn't yield what we were looking for. But it was interesting! Oh, and I must report to our LT department the fact that the search engine came up with a few dodgy sites - which I checked out just in case! Knowledge is power - but it can lead to a whole lot ofpeople feeling powerless. Knowledge needs to be managed, it needs to be sorted and it needs to be prioritised. If we ever let systems manage our organisations knowledge and information we will have lost the place. There are some super systems out there which can help us to manage the myriad of information which this cyber era places at our fingertips; literally a mouse-click away. Human beings, however, need to make the systems work for them and the organisations in which they work. …