Dialog: Running Light One-On-One
Suresh Shenoy is vice president at Information Management Consultants (IMC), located in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. IMC provides a wide range of IS planning, development and implementation services, with core competencies in delivering workflow and document management solutions for federal and corporate customers.
RL: As you know, we are putting together our report to assess the state of the knowledge industry. How do you see your company fitting into that space?
SS: One of the things that we have experienced over the years is that people are finding new and innovative ways to enhance the value that they bring to the organization as the technologies mature from "enabling" to those that are widely applied in the day-to-day office activities. In our own case, we have developed a methodology that allows us to look at application development project management in a disciplined fashion. Built around this methodology is a collection process models that are specific to vertical market requirements.
We have shied away form the term KM. Knowledge is more than what bits and bytes are able to deliver today. If we wish to share our experiences and our collective instincts, we need to move towards a better utilization of technologies. Our business solution framework is a small step in that direction.
RL: There is still a lot of confusion and lack of awareness around KM as it is defined or ill-defined. How would you define or explain it to somebody who is unfamiliar with it?
SS: I like to think of KM more as discipline rather than a technology space. There are supporting technologies to practice that discipline. It's almost like meditation. You can have all kinds of technology to support your discipline of meditating. Think of KM along the same lines. There is a whole series of core technologies that assist in practicing KM.
But we are far from a technology that allows you to capture the experiential side. I can describe to you that both Mexican food and Indian food are spicy, but not tell you exactly how they taste. I can even give you some recipes and share some pictures, but unless you go to an Indian and Mexican restaurant, you won't know how the taste differs. So the question is how to share that knowledge and experience.
RL: Many people say that KM is about the culture, in particular the way that culture enables the emotional intelligence and the adoption of technology.
SS: The rate of growth in technology has been significantly faster than our own emotional growth. What we see are young college graduates who are entering the labor market who have more technology savvy than many of the senior managers. As a result, it doesn't take too much work to convince the junior folks the advantages of implementing some new technology. The challenges and barriers are at the more senior levels.
RL: In five years, where will KM be as an industry and discipline?
SS: There are a whole range of supporting technologies that allow you to practice the KM discipline better and more efficiently. Number one, increasing bandwidth and the better utilization of bandwidth will remain an important issue in KM. I can have all the data in the world but if I have very narrow pipes I can't get that information to you, it doesn't serve any purpose.
The second thing is that media-rich applications and those that involve a lot of interactive media are going to find a significant role in KM. People see and relate to color and real motion better than reading.
The third thing is storage, especially when you have media-rich, unstructured data. I see data mining and data warehousing as becoming more important in our ability to reach in to this unstructured information to pull out the right information.
RL: What guidance you would give somebody who has been tasked with implementing a KM solution for their organization?
SS: We come across situations where companies are constantly struggling to keep up with the latest buzzwords. My advice is to do your research, do your homework, but don't get carried away. KM is a very important discipline -- it is very high on the minds of the senior executives we have come across. But don't look at it as a point solution or as a technology that delivers some kind of a silver bullet to solve all of your company's problems. Like anything else, there are a lot of little component technologies that make up the practice of KM, the discipline of sharing information across the enterprise with people who need it when they need it. KM should be viewed as a discipline and a practice rather than a point solution or a single technology