ALWAYS ON AND JUST IN TIME

by Stowe Boyd

Technologies are pushing us toward the "always-on" corporation, with an increasingly mobile workforce subjected to increased demands for productivity and efficiency. Large corporations are imposing an increasingly interconnected information technology infrastructure through supply, demand, and value chains, and they are becoming aware that the next frontier for real productivity gains will arise from process improvements -- operational knowledge management (KM) -- spanning these chains.

Knowledge management will come to mean the collection of practices and disciplines that companies will use to organize themselves -- and their network of partners -- to survive in this economy. Communication is the foundation of all interaction -- whether oriented toward investigation, negotiation, collaboration, or coordination.

Management of these technologies is not the end, but a critical and inescapable means to effect the management of knowledge. But at the same time, technologies that enable knowledge transfer and sharing are critical catalysts for the interactions between individuals in communities, between communities within companies, and between companies within keiretsu. And this next era of KM practice will become even more defined by technologies that help people interact more efficiently, more rapidly, and more deeply.

It has been said that the role technology has played in KM is a myth, but this is based on a narrow perception of technology -- specifically tools developed to explicitly manage knowledge artifacts or processes. This is far too limiting an approach for a future strategy.

The explosion of communication media of the past few years will continue into the next decade. The fusion of wired and wireless media will remake the core infrastructure of business, and ultimately all society. We will not be able to disassociate work from technology, aside from the occasional Mennonite or voluntary hermit. We can no more sever our ties to technology than we can think about life without death.

Technology is merely a tool, but so then are the written word, the automobile, and modern medicine. Communication technologies like cellular phones and instant messaging will do more than speed our interactions, they will make the world a smaller place: Marshall McLuhan's [1964] global village.

At the corporate level, making the company smaller and faster through new media is a nonlinear phenomenon. As the majority of people switch to the new media, there is a qualitative -- not simply quantitative -- change in knowledge flow. As corporations shift to "always on," people shift to "just-in-time" knowledge exchange almost immediately.

Why stockpile knowledge in warehouses when we have learned -- at great cost -- the benefits of just-in-time manufacturing and logistics? And given the pace of change in today's economy, how can you be sure today what information will be critically important downstream? How much of what is laboriously formalized and documented will be irrelevant, obsolete, or incorrect? This does not mean that analysis and planning are dead, but they are being rethought and recast in unexpected ways.

Consider the simple example of wireless communication and its impacts on meetings. The conventional wisdom of two years ago was that people would be having more "virtual meetings" and fewer face-to-face interactions. Instead, people are bringing wireless laptops or PDAs to what has turned out to be the same number of meetings, and remaining in contact with the wide, wide world at the same time. Meeting etiquette has adjusted to allow keyboarding on a wireless device, reading and writing e-mail, and other real-time communication activities during meetings. In most cases, the knowledge hunger of the company takes precedence over the meeting agenda.

The KM regimen of the future will be based on the emerging ideal of zero latency: capturing information and knowledge at exactly the point that it is necessary and no earlier. This will form the agenda of KM practitioners for the next decade and beyond.

Kenneth Boulding once wrote, "We make our tools, and then they shape us." Our interaction with communication media remakes how we organize ourselves, how we find and form information, and how we share knowledge. While these technologies are only tools, without them, this vision cannot be realized. The final measure of a tool is not its weight, dimensions, or even how well it fits the hand, but what emerges through its application. The technology matrix that will channel our communications must be judged in the same way: the future itself will be its product.

--Stowe Boyd, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium