Information Vs Knowledge

From Regional Knowledge Resource Kit

There is an important distinction between knowledge and information. These two resources have very different characteristics and the approaches to managing them are quite distinct. Understanding the different characteristics of these two resources enable the appropriate management approaches to be applied.

Data and information are any material that can be digitized. Knowledge is what is in people’s heads that enables them to do things. If we use an iceberg as a metaphor for an organisation’s knowledge resources, the tip of the iceberg would represent data and information. The bulk of the iceberg below the waterline represents the knowledge in people’s heads.

Data and Information

The visible component of the iceberg is the domain of data and information management. Managing in this domain requires a different set of skills than is required to manage the knowledge resources (represented by the area below the waterline). Information management is concerned with concepts such as: search, browse, store, retrieve, organize, tangible, explicit, database, document and record management, folder, metadata, taxonomy, search engine. Data and information have a set of characteristics which are relatively predictable and are thus more amenable to reproducible techniques such as categorization and to management through policy and procedure. That is not to say that this domain is easy to manage, just relatively predictable. Information alone does not cause things to happen. As described by Polyani and Prosch information (such as a map), no matter how elaborate it is, cannot read itself; it requires the judgment of a skilled reader who will relate the map to the world through both cognitive and sensory means. Debra Amidon, in 1991, described that information, in and of itself, is not useful until it is embodied in a person’s awareness and related to business imperatives.

Knowledge

The management concepts applicable below the waterline of the iceberg, in the domain of people and their knowledge, are completely different. These concepts include terms such as talk, listen, share, learn, create, discover, dialogue, collaborate, act, choice, relationships, emotion, organic, adaptive, complex and (one of the major issue for knowledge sharing) trust. Knowledge is that tacit and relatively intangible resource within every individual. The very intangibility of knowledge works against its effective use in many organisations: because it does not lend itself to the process-focused and normative approaches of industrial-age organisations, less focus is often placed on it than on the more tangible information and data assets of organisations. While estimates vary, the proportion of an organisation’s knowledge resources that reside in the minds of people is probably somewhere between 80 and 99% - the overwhelming majority of an organisation’s knowledge resources reside in the heads and hands of their staff.

There are three useful principles that can be applied to knowledge and its ‘management’. These principles should be continuously in mind when designing ways to improve how regional NRM bodies obtain value form their knowledge resources:

Knowledge can only ever be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted.

• If knowledge is the stuff in people’s heads, then it cannot be commanded. The task is to create an organisational environment where sharing is valued and supported by appropriate behaviours. This characteristic has deep implications, as observed by Peter Drucker in 1998: “In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts”.

We always know more than we can tell, and we can always tell more than we can write.

• Hari Tsoukas has a good take on this: “the knowledge people use in organisations is so practical and deeply familiar to them that when people are asked to describe how they do what they do, they often find it hard to express it in words” . Going back even further, Polanyi observed that “the aim of a skilful performance is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are not known as such by the person following them” . With these comments in mind, our take is that the notion of ‘capturing knowledge’ by converting it into written form (unstructured information) is important, but it has serious limitations. ‘Capture’ requires enormous effort; it can rapidly become obsolete; it can be taken out of context and its subsequent use is not able to be controlled. A focus on capturing explicit knowledge is unsustainable..

We only know what we know when we need to know it.

• Human knowledge is deeply contextual, it is triggered by circumstance and need, and is revealed in action. It can also be reconstructed using narrative techniques. As Dave Snowden points out, to ask someone what he or she knows is to ask a meaningless question in a meaningless context. Tacit knowledge can only be displayed and manifested (not ‘captured’) in what we do, and that new knowledge comes about when “our skilled performance is punctuated in new ways through social interaction”. (Tsoukas).

Notes

• Polanyi, M. and Prosch, H. (1975) Meaning, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press http://www.entovation.com/gkp/origins.htm Delphi KM Conference, San Diego 1998.
• Polanyi, M., The Tacit Dimension republished by Doubleday & Company 1983 ISBN 0-8446 5999-1
• Tsoukas, H (2002). Do we really understand tacit knowledge?, Presented to Knowledge Economy and Society Seminar, LSE Department of Information Systems, 14 June 2002. Available at http://is.lse.ac.uk/events/ESRCseminars/tsoukas.pdf
• Polanyi, M. (1962) Personal Knowledge, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p49