denotes premium content | May 22 2013 Feature
posted 1 Jul 1999 in Volume 2 Issue 10
The sorcerer's apprentice
Do you often feel
like the sorcerer's apprentice, where your PC weaves a spell that opens all the
floodgates of information whether you need it or not? Do you often feel so
overwhelmed by the number of emails, documents, shared files etc. at your grasp
that your mind starts to suffer from an 'attention deficit disorder', where the
spell just gets out of hand and knowledge disappears like a needle in a haystack
of information? In this article, Charles Sieloff gives some important advice
about the dangers of expecting total information-access to be the path to
knowledge-access.
Maybe it's not your culture or your infrastructure. Maybe there just
aren't enough hours in the day to deal with everything you are expected to know.
The scarcest resource in the emerging knowledge economy is not knowledge itself,
but people's attention: the limited capacity that all of us have to acquire,
use, or transfer the knowledge that is available to us. Yet, the conventional
wisdom associated with "knowledge management" and "the learning organization"
often seems to imply that the goal is to cram as much knowledge as possible into
everyone's head. As Jack Welch has put it, "Everyone needs to know everything,
so they can make the right decisions by themselves." 1 A successful knowledge management strategy
must start by recognizing the utter impracticality and futility of that vision.
In fact, the central problem of knowledge management facing most of our large
corporations is not the creation of new knowledge, or even the capture of
existing knowledge, it is managing the flow of knowledge through and around the
critical bottleneck of personal attention and learning capacity.
The need to manage both
knowledge and attention is nothing new for the world of business. As companies
began to grow beyond the personal scale of the owner/proprietor in the second
half of the nineteenth century, they had to learn how to capture the tacit
knowledge of their workers and translate it into more explicit and leveragable
forms, by creating well documented policies, procedures, processes, and
instructions. 2
The formal hierarchical organization
structure, with its bureaucratic way of managing horizontal and vertical
relationships, co-evolved as a more effective way of managing attention within
the ever larger and more geographically dispersed organizations that emerged
from this earlier knowledge management revolution. Roles and responsibilities,
along with the lines of communication connecting them, became more formalized
and specialized. Just as the division of labour allowed complex products to be
built up from a series of simple, easily manageable physical tasks, so did the
"division of knowledge" allow large and complex organizations to operate with an
unprecedented degree of coherence and coordination. People knew what they needed
to know in order to fulfil their assigned role in the organization.
Moving from
information scarcity to information abundance
In today's world, it is hard to
remember that information was once as scarce and costly a resource as capital
equipment. The compartmentalization of knowledge and the careful control of
information flows were not willful attempts to keep people ignorant and
helpless, but were rather reasonably effective ways of leveraging and amplifying
the power of what little knowledge could be captured and communicated, given the
extremely low bandwidth of the available communications channels.
The telegraph and
telephone had overcome barriers of distance, but only for limited,
point-to-point communication. Meanwhile, paper-based communication remained
labour-intensive and expensive to create, copy, distribute, and store, so it is
not surprising that information was only available to those with the most
compelling need to receive it. 3The
spread of convenience copiers and computer printers in the 1970's dramatically
decreased the cost of copying information, but the real breakthrough has been
the much more recent emergence of pervasively networked computing, which changed
the model from "print, then distribute" to "distribute, then (selectively)
print". Suddenly the cost of capturing, copying, distributing, and storing
written information has become almost negligible for individual documents
(although still significant in the aggregate, because of greatly increased
volumes).
Originally, these technologies were thought of as better ways to deal
with the existing, official sources of information. Management memos could be
distributed more quickly and more broadly. Policies and procedures could be kept
up-to-date and made accessible to everyone in the organization. Presentations
could be captured in a consistent format and leveraged more widely. Operational
reports could be generated more quickly, with more detail available for
analysis. All of these things have happened over the last ten years, but
something else happened as well.
By dramatically lowering the cost and
convenience threshold for creating and disseminating content, and by increasing
the potential for direct connections among all members of an organization, the
technology has opened the floodgates which once kept information and knowledge
neatly localized, compartmentalized, and channeled. Most of the focus has been
on how this has transformed our role as information consumers, giving us ready
access to vast quantities of 'information at our fingertips', but the real
revolution has been the incredible expansion in the number of information
providers who are now able to reach beyond their own local workgroup and
contribute to the shared repositories of the organization (or even the
collective repository of the World Wide Web). Where we once felt starved for
information as it trickled through our in-trays, we now feel overwhelmed by a
supply which, however relevant and valuable some of it might be, far exceeds our
capacity to absorb and turn into useful knowledge.
In fact, the relationship between
information and knowledge, and the nature of knowledge work itself has been
transformed. The knowledge management revolution of the late nineteenth century
focused on capturing tacit knowledge and embedding it in stable organizational
structures and procedures that, once established, could be managed effectively
with minimal flows of information. The relatively small cadre of knowledge
workers who designed and managed these structures and processes became the
heroes of the industrial age, using their precious knowledge to create
organizations of unprecedented scale which could operate in an environment of
information scarcity.
As computer technology increased the volume and accessibility of
information, the ranks of those who were empowered to use the information in
creative and semi-autonomous ways grew rapidly. But the widely recognized growth
in the importance of knowledge workers did not immediately lead to a focus on
"knowledge management" as a serious issue, because most knowledge workers still
saw the increased flow of information as positive, and even liberating. The I.S.
organization in most companies spent many years trying to catch up with the
ever-escalating demands for more information. Only in the last few years, when
the supply of information at the individual level suddenly shifted from a state
of scarcity to a state of intrusive abundance, has there been a growing
awareness that knowledge management is a major challenge.
On the one hand, the shift from
information scarcity to abundance has created unprecedented opportunities for
knowledge workers to enrich their inputs and amplify their outputs across space,
time, and organizational boundaries. On the other hand, the shift has also
exposed their very limited capacity to take advantage of those opportunities,
creating a form of collective frustration and anxiety which we often label
"information overload." As Herbert Simon put it: "Nothing in the new technology
increases the number of hours in the day or the capacities of human beings to
absorb information. The real design problem is not to provide more information
to people but to allocate the time they have available for receiving information
so that they will get only the information that is most important and relevant
to the decisions they will make. The task is not to design
information-distributing systems but intelligent information-filtering systems."
4
Moving beyond knowledge
management to attention management
Too many knowledge management
strategies stop short of the real problem. They focus on capturing the personal
and often tacit knowledge of individuals, and building some kind of shared
repository which will preserve the knowledge over time, distribute it across
distance, and make it accessible to the broadest possible audience. There would
seem to be obvious value in such efforts, and yet they often fail to have the
intended impact, either because the knowledge sources don't contribute enough to
the repository, or because the intended beneficiaries don't take advantage of
what's there, or both. At this point, the blame is usually assigned to some
combination of corporate culture (knowledge hoarding, competitiveness,
"not-invented-here" attitude), incentives (insufficient rewards for sharing or
reusing knowledge), and technology (too difficult to use, too expensive).
Before embarking
on a long crusade to change the culture or create a whole new infrastructure, it
would be wise to step back and look at the problem from an attention management
perspective. Are your knowledge management efforts actually helping people make
better use of their limited attention capacity, or have you simply added another
element to the already crowded competition for their scarcest resource? The
following strategies illustrate how an attention management focus might redirect
some of your knowledge management efforts.
Encourage deliberate
ignorance
This sounds like heresy, but it may be the most effective way to reduce
the escalating demands on people's attention. Is there some way to deliver the
benefits of the knowledge without forcing others to acquire it for themselves?
Can we reduce the number of people who really need to understand a topic by
embedding their knowledge in automated or facilitated processes? We can't
individually know everything that we know collectively, so we need to be
selective about what we try to learn and understand. Just because something is
important, doesn't mean that everyone needs to understand it. We routinely
accept (indeed, demand) this approach in broad areas of our private life, but
often seem reluctant to use the same approach at work.
This is not a return to the industrial
age model of human automatons blindly following bureaucratic procedures. To be
effective, this strategy of voluntary ignorance depends on a high degree of
trust between the creators of the knowledge and the users or beneficiaries of
it. We are relieving them of the need to know something, not trying to deny them
access to the underlying knowledge. Because of this, it is important that the
knowledge be well documented and accessible, even if few people will want to
drill down into the details.
| Example: PC's are complex and time-consuming for individuals to manage, yet they deliver important capabilities. Rather than trying to get everyone to do a better job of managing their PC, a small group of specialists has created a fully automated environment for distributing, installing, and configuring PC software over a shared network infrastructure. This so-called Common Operating Environment has been voluntarily adopted by over 100,000 PC users as a way of dramatically reducing the amount of time and attention they have to devote to maintaining their PC's. For the most part, they are delighted to remain ignorant of the underlying expertise needed to create that environment.5 |
Often, some form of knowledge is needed only occasionally to improve performance of a task, but it is not the central focus of a person's job. Yet, we try to send the person to a training course or expect him to read a whole manual or remember a year-old memo in order to figure out what needs to be done. It's a little bit like trying to carry a full inventory of parts at every location where a part might be needed. Unfortunately, the carrying cost for our personal inventory of 'just-in-case' knowledge doesn't show up on any accounting report, and the enormous shrinkage due to faulty recall is also unmeasured, so we keep pursuing our flawed knowledge distribution strategies.
The specialist knowledge providers usually feel like they have done their job by making their knowledge explicit and available, but the would-be user wants just enough of the knowledge to get him through his immediate task, and has no desire to become more expert in the field, or even to remember what is needed from one occurrence to the next.
The conflict can only be resolved by redefining the responsibilities of the knowledge providers to include minimizing the demands made on the user's attention and learning capacity wherever possible. Such a change may also require a willingness on the part of the user to pay for the added convenience of this new 'inventory management' service.
| Example: Internal help desks often adopt a goal of reducing the number of calls through a combination of educating their users and providing a self-help capability through direct access to knowledge repositories. The justification is that this can reduce the visible, measured cost of the help desk activity, but, of course, it greatly increases the invisible, unmeasured cost of forcing a broad audience to deal with knowledge that is only needed on an exception basis. Realistic "attention accounting" would, instead, look at the total demands made upon the time of the broad audience (time spent reading about problems they don't have, time spent learning how to use a self-help capability, time spent searching for answers, time spent asking co-workers for help, etc.), and weigh that against the cost of providing a quick, on-demand answer to a simple question. |
The new technologies have encouraged disintermediation in situations where the intermediary's role was based on controlling the distribution and storage of physical or intellectual assets, but they have also created new opportunities for intermediaries who can reduce the demands which would otherwise be made on the customer's time and attention.6
A similar phenomenon is occurring within the corporation, although the zeal for cost cutting and organizational flattening, and the absence of a responsive market mechanism, often makes it difficult for new intermediary roles to escape the stigma of being seen as unnecessary overhead.
For the most part, the bureaucratic or technical barriers that kept information from flowing freely throughout the organization have been removed, making it possible for non-specialists to access directly the same information flows and repositories that others use in their own specialized knowledge domains. While it may seem like a high level of knowledge sharing has been enabled through such mechanisms, the non-specialists usually need a different level of filtering and interpretation to make effective use of such cross-domain knowledge. In response to this need, new roles are emerging for intermediaries who can filter, summarize, interpret, and evaluate information in forms that are designed to be useful to specific audiences. The job descriptions are often fuzzy, but these roles may combine elements of a librarian, a journalist, or a research analyst. Some may take pride in strict objectivity, while others may add value through their distinctive point of view. Unless such intermediary roles are acknowledged and rewarded, the investments made in a knowledge sharing infrastructure may produce few dividends.
| Example: Powerful search engines work fine when the problem is finding a few well-defined needles in an arbitrarily large haystack, but when the problem is trolling through a fast moving stream of new information looking for patterns, trends, and events which could lead to new insights, there is still no substitute for human judgment. The ability to monitor electronic feeds of internal and external information, combined with the ability to broadly distribute (email) or post (internal Web) summaries, extracts, and/or commentaries has resulted in the rapid growth of a new breed of (often informal) intermediary. These intermediaries are essentially helping to allocate and manage a very valuable resource: the attention of the broader organization. |
With today's technology, information can flow quickly and easily across the traditional barriers of time and distance, but transforming the information into knowledge and translating the knowledge into action still requires human involvement. In fact, as the complexity of work increases, the human involvement often takes the form of intensive group collaboration, since no individual is likely to have all the skills and resources needed to complete the task at hand.
Although the physical work environment can have a profound impact on the level of collaboration that takes place, most organizations delegate the design of their workspaces to a Facilities organization that measures success by how many people can be packed into a given space. Having created a dysfunctional work environment of tightly packed cubicles, such organizations compound the error by encouraging further "cost saving" measures such as hoteling and telecommuting.
Seen from an "attention management" perspective, there is an obvious benefit to creating an environment in which collaboration occurs as naturally and effortlessly as possible. A co-located team in an open office environment with shared project spaces can hardly avoid interacting with each other almost continuously.7
If the same team is housed in private offices or high-walled cubicles, a higher level of deliberate attention and effort will be needed to achieve the level of interaction found in open environments, including such things as regularly scheduled meetings, more extensive documentation, more formal mentoring of new employees, and more disciplined status reporting. When the team is spread across multiple locations and time zones, the effort it takes to achieve any given level of collaboration and communication will exact an even greater toll on the attention of all participants.
| Example: After three years of experimenting with alternative office environments, a number of valuable lessons have been learned. An open environment with flexible furniture configurations and shared team spaces leads to a measurable increase in communication and collaboration among team members. Other observed benefits include fewer formal meetings, faster integration of new team members, and reduced cycle times for projects. Privacy concerns are real, but can be effectively addressed by such things as the availability of temporary isolated workspaces and the use of mobile phones. In fact, a sense of privacy has more to do with being able to see who can overhear you, than with the presence of partitions or other visual screens. In spite of these positive results, it is still true that most knowledge workers will express a strong preference for a more closed environment, at least until they have personally experienced the alternative for several months. |
Information is more likely to become useful and usable knowledge if it is delivered within a rich context. Where does the information come from and how up-to-date is it? How reliable is the source? Why is it relevant to my situation? Does it replace or supplement or contradict other information? Who else uses this information? Where can I find related information? When most information came from the formal organization, context was more easily understood. Much of that context was simply a side effect of having formal chains of command and channels of communication, since the roles and responsibilities of both the sender and the receiver were usually well understood. The formal organization also took care to provide a managed context, in the form of explicit organizing structures for the current version of whatever standards, policies, and procedures were being communicated.
Unfortunately, the same technologies that have increased our supply of available information have also tended to undermine our ability to manage context. When most information no longer flows through formal channels, and when providers and consumers find each other without the benefit of intermediaries, many of the old contextual cues are irretrievably lost. Email, voice mail, and the Web have created an interrupt-driven, fragmented information environment, which leads to a form of self-induced 'attention deficit disorder' for knowledge workers. For the computer-enabled knowledge worker, every click of the mouse may lead to an abrupt change of context. To counteract this, a conscious effort must be made to re-establish the power of well-designed contextual frameworks within the electronic spaces of the organization.
| Example: Several years ago, an on-line repository was established to provide the sales organization with a single source of information about products, strategies, and competitors. The relatively crude (pre-Web) technology required all the files to be collected in one place and organized into a simple hierarchy of logical folders, with each folder and each item described in a standard way. In other words, it required the creation of a context. When the repository was replaced with more advanced Web technology, the dozens of different organizations providing information began setting up their own Web sites to provide direct access to the sales organization, but it soon became apparent that the sales people would have a much more difficult time finding what they needed if the old context was destroyed and replaced with multiple, inconsistent sources competing for their attention. The integrity of the centrally managed repository was restored and the unlimited flexibility of the new technology was reined in somewhat to preserve the contextual framework. The repository had acquired the strength of a managed brand, providing mostly unappreciated attributes of consistency, completeness, timeliness, convenience, and support. |
In today's connected world, information providers need to take more responsibility for the hidden costs of their profligate distribution behavior. Just as junk mailers are free to ignore the systemic costs imposed on each recipient (picking up, sorting, throwing out, recycling, and ultimate disposal), so are internal information providers free to ignore the "attention costs" of their actions. It is, in fact, far easier to send an email message to a thousand people, and let each of them figure out whether they need to do anything with the information, than it is to determine in advance who actually needs or wants to see the message. It won't work for everything, but wherever possible, information providers should be targeting their audiences as precisely as possible, and information receivers should be given as much control as possible over what they receive.
| Example: Large distribution lists are a major source of pain in most organizations. They are usually centrally maintained and difficult to keep accurate because of constant job changes and address changes. Because of the high administrative cost, the number of lists is minimized, and existing lists are frequently used for multiple purposes, even though a larger number of more precise lists would be much more accurate. To shift more control to the receiver, we created a central catalogue of public distribution lists, each of which contains a description of its intended purpose. It is now possible for every individual to review on-line hundreds of these lists, adding or deleting himself at will from any of them. Because the administrative overhead has been eliminated, lists can be targeted for very specific purposes. Because addresses are retrieved only at the time of mailing, accuracy is no longer an issue. Because people can add or remove themselves at will, the information is going only to those who are interested, and is usually finding a larger, but also more precisely targeted audience than ever before. It doesn't eliminate the need for controlled lists or push mailings, but it does eliminate the inappropriate use of such lists for more general information distribution. |
The World Wide Web has thrived on the model of free exchange of information, letting knowledge providers and knowledge seekers find each other through a combination of luck, accident, word-of-mouth, and systematic searching. The approach can achieve near miracles of spontaneous community formation around an extraordinary variety of interests, but it does not begin to meet the needs of a business organization which is trying to ensure that valuable knowledge is properly documented, easily accessible, and (most importantly) actually used by those who could benefit from it. 8
The advertising model, in which third parties pay the information providers in order to gain access to the receivers, is also inappropriate for most business environments, especially since it works primarily by competing as aggressively as possible for your scarcest resource: the attention of the receivers.
The problem is that all of the above strategies for better attention management require some form of resource investment which goes beyond the traditional role and responsibility of the corporate knowledge provider. Often the extra effort is not for the direct benefit of the provider or his traditional constituency, but rather for the much more diffuse benefit of the organization at large. In a fiercely competitive business environment, dependence on altruistic behavior is not generally a sustainable strategy. Either the business will have to subsidize these new activities through an explicit reprioritization of budgets, or it will have to encourage the creation of more responsive market mechanisms which will allow valuable services to be directly supported by those who benefit from them.
| Example: Even though our environment supports a high level of chargeback activity, the billing mechanisms are so cumbersome and expensive that services are often not offered unless the individual bill would exceed some arbitrary threshold of about $1000. We now have the capability of delivering network-based services at very low cost to very large numbers of employees, but we haven t had easy ways to let them pay for the services they want to use. In response, we recently implemented a new internal billing infrastructure, which can handle micropayments of less than $1 very efficiently by creating the electronic equivalent of a debit card. In the first few months, over 70 internal services have begun using this mechanism, and we expect to see a wide variety of new services (e.g., internal search engines, intelligent agents, filtered reports, well-designed Web sites, proprietary outside information, etc.) reaching a much larger potential audience once the approach is more widely understood and adopted. |
Charles Sieloff is Knowledge Management Consultant, working for Hewlett Packard's Corporate Information Systems organization. He can be contacted at:
chuck_sieloff@hp.com
