Tabor School of Business
ABSTRACT
This
paper clarifies Personal Knowledge Management, and its seven information
skills, as a framework for the education of those preparing for knowledge work
roles in global business and management.
The seven information skills highlighted are: (1) retrieving information; (2) evaluating information; (3)
organizing information; (4) collaborating around information; (5) analyzing
information; (6) presenting information; and (7) securing information. For each information skill, there is a
discussion of its significance, the logical skills required for its effective
use, and its technological components.
Emphasis is placed on the importance of educating current and future
knowledge workers to effectively use these skills in the context of their
personal responsibility for managing knowledge.
In
his classic work published in 1968, The
Age of Discontinuity, Peter Drucker (1968) coined the phrases knowledge
society and knowledge worker. Framing
his work in an historical perspective, Drucker traced the social and economic
dimensions of the shift from literacy to knowledge, from craft to credentials,
and from the centrality of physical to the centrality of informational
resources (Flaherty, 1999). Drucker
recognized the challenge of the productivity of knowledge worker and the
centrality of knowledge workers as assets that needed to be managed within organizations. At the same time, Drucker recognized that,
because of their specialized knowledge, knowledge workers “cannot in effect, be
supervised” (Flaherty, 237). This had significant
implications for traditional theories of supervision; what became central,
then, was management developing in the knowledge worker the capability of
managing themselves. For Drucker, what
was key to information becoming knowledge in the knowledge society is the
application of information to doing something; knowledge is “information in
action for results” (Flaherty, 1999).
Thirty
years later, with the dawn of the twenty-first century, the challenge of
knowledge worker productivity first outlined by Drucker is even clearer. Now the challenge of business enterprises,
increasingly global, is to build learning organizations that manage their
knowledge resources effectively and continually build new capabilities to help
them master their environments (Senge, 1990).
Knowledge management is the buzzword, as organizations face the daily
challenge of mastering their information and knowledge environment (Davenport,
1997). While it is recognized that
information technology can and will play a central role in learning
organizations and knowledge management, at the same time it is recognized that
the role of information technology in creating an “information ecology” can
easily be oversold (Davenport,
1997). Technology must support
strategy, not drive it. At the same
time, technology is viewed as an important asset of the multinational firm
(Sanchez, Heene, and Thomas, 1996; Sanchez and Mahoney, 1996) and as an
important driving force in the process of globalization (Friedman, 1999). The complicating factor of information
technology is that it has played a central role in creating an unmanageably
dense information environment that threatens to overwhelm the global business
organization and the knowledge worker (Shenk, 1997).
Frand
and Hixon (1999) of the Anderson School of Management at UCLA introduce the
concept of Personal Knowledge Management as a vehicle for helping MBA students
at the Anderson School gain the information skills necessary to succeed in the
emerging global business environment.
Personal knowledge management shifts the focus for knowledge management
from the organization, as in traditional knowledge management, to the
individual knowledge worker. This
framework was developed in conjunction with the required purchase of laptops
for MBA students and was a vehicle for helping MBA students organize the
information that they needed to succeed within their MBA careers. Personal Knowledge Management was developed
in close collaboration with reference librarians who provide support in
delivering the Anderson Edge, a program of training in Personal Knowledge
Management skills that focuses on organizing, retrieving, and evaluating
information.
Dorsey and colleagues (Avery, Brooks, Brown, Dorsey,
O’Conner, 2001) broaden the framework
of Personal Knowledge Management considerably beyond its formulation at the
Anderson School of Management. They
emphasize the promise of Personal Knowledge Management, as an educational
framework for undergraduate education, in three different, but complementary,
areas: (1) as a stimulus for an
improved sense of student responsibility; (2) as a framework for integrating
general education and majors; and (3) as an approach to technology integration
initiatives throughout the curriculum.
Central to Personal Knowledge Management, as they have clarified it, are
seven information skills whose exercise together is integral to effective
knowledge work. These seven skills
are: (1) retrieving information; (2)
evaluating information; (3) organizing information; (4) collaborating around
information; (5) analyzing information; (6) presenting information; and (7)
securing information.
This
paper moves beyond this earlier work by focusing on Personal Knowledge
Management as a framework for the integration of information technology into
global business and management education, whether in institutions of higher
education or in the global business enterprise itself. The focus is not just on identifying those
technology components and tools that are useful in managing personal knowledge,
but also on identifying those logical information skills that are foundational
to Personal Knowledge Management. Just
as technology within the global enterprise should serve corporate strategy, not
drive it (Hartman and Sifonis, 2000), so information technology at the level of
the knowledge worker must serve their strategic purpose not drive it.
This
paper does not deal in a systematic fashion with the larger implications of the
Personal Knowledge Management framework for managers themselves and for their
personal and management practices. The
concept of Personal Knowledge Management does have implications for the
personal knowledge management practices of managers at various levels of the
managerial pyramid as well as implications for their management practices as
related to knowledge workers. These
issues, while important, are outside of the focus of this paper that centers on
issues of education for global business.
Below
is discussed each of the seven information skills. For each, the focus is on the significance of the skill and the
technology tools and issues regarding its effective and efficient use. The breadth of tools and issues renders
completeness in clarifying these seven information skills impossible of
achievement. The goal is to describe
the seven information skills with sufficient clarity to help those involved in
the challenge of building effective development programs for knowledge workers
aware of the requirements of such programs.
Key to an effective educational program is also development of an ethic
of personal responsibility that facilitates self-management of the knowledge
worker by himself or herself.
The collaboration of Frand and Hixon (1999) within the UCLA
Personal Knowledge Management initiative demonstrates the importance of the
skills of the reference librarian in the development of the information
retrieval skills that are integral to the Personal Knowledge Management
process. Concepts of widening and narrowing one’s search, Boolean logic, and
iterative search practices are an important part of the effective exercise of
this Personal Knowledge Management skill.
Effective retrieval requires that considerable effort be placed on
framing inquiry even before information retrieval commences; familiarity with
subjects and keywords is central.
Different search tools are based on different premises (e.g., the nature
of indexing), and effective use of those tools requires some understanding of
those premises.
Different information resources will be useful for
different types of knowledge workers, and it will be important as part of the
development of knowledge workers to develop an understanding of the relative
usefulness of these different information resources to support both their
actions and their personal development.
Obviously, satisficing, not optimizing, is the reigning concept in
retrieval.
Evaluating Information
The
information explosion has carried with it the much greater availability of
unfiltered and uncensored information.
The growth of the Internet has brought with it a proliferation of
information of varying quality. The
burden is placed on the individual knowledge worker to evaluate that
information. The challenge is to
prevent that evaluation of information from overwhelming the knowledge worker.
The
evaluation of information focuses on both the quality and relevance of
information. Evaluation can take place as
part of the retrieval process itself or as a phase engaged in after the
retrieval process. The relevance issue
relates to the relatedness of information to the action at hand; the quality
issue relates to judgments about the accuracy of the information. Reference librarians have developed various
heuristics that have been organized through their web sites to facilitate the
process of evaluating and assessing information (Frand and Hixon, 1999).
Organizing Information
Frand and Hixon (1999) identify organizing information as
one of their central Personal Knowledge Management skills. They emphasize the development of coherent
principles for an organization of folders to give structure to the work of the
MBA student; chronological, functional, and role-based approaches have been
explored. These types of organization
facilitate the learning process by supporting the connection of new information
to old information within the human processing system.
In some ways, the challenge of organizing information for
consistent knowledge work is a most fundamental challenge for the knowledge
worker. There are variety of
information technologies available to facilitate this: relational databases, web sites, the Palm
Pilot, and personal information management software. The challenge is to develop approaches that enable individual
knowledge workers to develop strategies consistent with the nature of their
work, with their learning styles, and with the nature of collaborative
relationships they may have. Developing
a system that enables the knowledge worker to continue to develop and grow by
assimilating new knowledge, including from their own successes and failures, is
central.
Collaborating Around Information
Increasingly
collaborating around information, not just within, but between organizations,
defines global enterprises. Electronic
mail, various forms of conferencing, and web-based structures for collaboration
increasingly provide the infrastructure for the work of the enterprise and of
the knowledge worker. The virtual
enterprise is, in fact, defined by its collaboration around information in
conjunction with the strategic purposes of the enterprise.
The challenge of collaborating around information, as it
relates to technology, is to identify how information technology can support
the process of working smarter, rather merely harder, and to overcome obstacles
in the form of the absence of social cues for appropriate behavior. The time spent in more face-to-face and
richer electronic collaborative environments needs to be devoted to higher
value activities while the actual sharing of information can be done through
mechanisms that involve less collaborative activity. The development of groupware tools should bring a range of
information technology tools that support the wide range of group activities
required for effective collaboration.
Analyzing Information
The
analysis of information is fundamental to the process of converting information
into knowledge (Avery, et.al, 2001).
Analysis builds on the organization of information, but goes beyond it
in its emphasis on the importance of frameworks, models, and theories grounded
in the standards of public communities. Analysis of information addresses the
challenge of extracting meaning out of data.
There are many information technology tools for analysis, but here the
focus is on three: simulation software, spreadsheet software, and statistical
software.
In
his analysis of the requirements of the learning organization, Senge (1990)
points to the creation of computer-based microworlds that seek to simulate the
dynamic complexity of real world settings.
The use of simulation software makes possible the creation of these
worlds so that users can play in these worlds and learn from something like
firsthand experience and develop new and improved understandings and
capabilities. At the same time, using
simulation software presumes the capability of identifying the relationships
that ground the microworld that is created.
The use of simulation software is based on model-building that is a
demanding logical information skill, requiring users to specify and clarify
relationships between the elements of complex systems.
In
an analysis of the process of simulating to innovate through the prototyping
process, Schrage (2000) clarifies what he terms the “spreadsheet way of
knowledge.” Schrage points out that
“the financial innovations and financial engineering that transformed the
business landscape of the 1980s are written in the cells of spreadsheet
software.” The increasing use of
spreadsheets significantly impacts financial organizations through the
ascendancy of give-and-take and an explosion of questions that enable
organizations to ask themselves questions they had never been able to ask before. While the spreadsheet as tool was important,
it is the concept of the spreadsheet way of knowledge, building on
give-and-take and questions, that clarifies the significance of this tool and
its impact on organizations.
Finally,
the development of database technology beyond transaction processing toward
managerial databases based on data warehousing technology brings new
opportunities for the use of statistical tools to analyze business data. Data mining focuses on identifying decision
information and principles from a complex exploration of relationships within
sets of data. The appropriate use of
statistical software as a part of the data mining process is, of course, based
on an appropriate understanding of the nature of data, sound inference, and an
understanding of potentially meaningful relationships within a data set as they
relate to decision-making.
Securing Information
Securing
information has traditionally not been identified as a central information
skill that needs to be developed.
However, two larger developments in the global business environment
conspire to make this skill central, for both organizations and knowledge workers. One of those developments is the increasing
recognition of the strategic uses of information and knowledge, and the
strategic benefit to be gained from sustained asymmetries in information
(Williamson, 1985). The second
development is the explosive growth of networked environments that magnify both
the risks, and the opportunities, associated with information sharing. The significant growth in intranets, which
integrate organizations, and extranets, which connect organizations with their
customers and suppliers, intensifies this larger concern for securing
information.
Summers
(1997) identifies three major security properties: confidentiality, integrity,
and availability. Other properties and
services related to these three are authentication, access control, audit, and
nonrepudiation. Given the pervasiveness
of electronic and networked environments, these security properties must
increasingly become self-consciously pursued.
Security of information—its privacy, integrity, and availability—can no
longer be taken for granted by either the global enterprise or the knowledge
worker (Schneier, 2000).
Knowledge
workers should become able to frame tradeoffs regarding security as global
enterprises engage in more complex information sharing relationships with other
firms. Issues of intellectual property
will become no less complex. In
operating within complex networked environments, knowledge workers will need to
understand password management—or management of other authentication tools, the
use of encryption, and other tools and technologies relating to security.
The seven information skills of Personal Knowledge
Management have been clarified above with the intent of identifying challenges
that institutions of higher education and global enterprises face as they
address the business challenges of worker productivity and effectiveness in the
twenty-first century. These challenges
of harnessing and directing the intellectual power of knowledge workers are
both educational challenges and management challenges, and both educators and
managers need to address those challenges.
The focus has not been on the business disciplines, such as marketing or
finance, but on a set of information skills, which crosscut the business
disciplines. It is argued that it these
information skills, intertwined with technology tools, that provide the
framework for addressing the twenty-first century challenge of knowledge worker
productivity. Technology serves the
personal strategy of the knowledge worker and does not drive it.
In
a recently published monograph entitled Simplicity,
Jensen (2000) focuses on the development of a set of practical tools for
managing organizational complexity.
Jensen’s approach seeks to bring together work processes, knowledge management,
and business strategy development in the process of cutting through the clutter
of current workplaces. Personal
Knowledge Management, with its seven information skills, can be viewed as a
complement to the Simplicity toolkit
in approaching the riddle of the productivity of knowledge work. Organizations, and knowledge workers, will
continue to face the challenge of being open to new developments and ideas and,
at the same time, creating and sustaining the kind of focus that organizations
must have to succeed. Managing that
creative tension, with the help of Personal Knowledge Management and the Simplicity toolkit, will be critical to
knowledge worker success in the twenty-first century.
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