Byron Glick, in an IT Insights piece for The Wisconsin Technology Network, talks about: Transforming Information to Knowledge.
Borrowing from Aesop's Golden Goose fable he writes:
...A man and his wife had the good fortune to possess a goose, which laid a golden egg every day. Lucky though they were, they soon began to think they were not getting rich fast enough, and, imagining the bird must be made of gold inside, they decided to kill it in order to secure the whole store of precious metal at once. But when they cut it open they found it was just like any other goose. Thus, they neither got rich all at once, as they had hoped, nor enjoyed any longer the daily addition to their wealth. Aesop
From a management point of view, Aesop describes two kinds of knowledge assets: intellectual assets and knowledge workers. Golden eggs represent intellectual property, the unique processes and various types of knowledge and experience that exist within our organizations. IT captures some, but by no means all, of this rich stream. The bits that can be documented, digitized and chopped up into databases all get IT attention but there is less certainty regarding the bigger parts, such as individual's creative ideas, insightful conversations among coworkers or a discussion focused on an engineer's design.
The second type of knowledge asset, the goose, represents the engine of production in the new economy, the knowledge worker. People create this asset and they use it daily, extracting the value from the golden egg. This human role is not readily reduced to bits and bytes, which poses an interesting challenge for IT.
IT departments are experts at building information pipelines for the desktop, but that's not enough anymore. Those dreadfully efficient pipes are creating geese overstuffed with information, which is great for pate but not so good for productivity and creativity. IT can't continue to treat the use of information and knowledge as unintended system consequences. Information managers must shift attention from volume and availability to content-related issues such as quality and reliability...
K-Collector Topics: Conversations Ideas knowledge work Productivity Security Thinking