Last week, during a talk I gave on National Governmental Knowledge Management to George Washington University’s University Seminar on Complex Systems, one of the members of the Seminar, asked a question about the Distributed Organizational Knowledge Base (DOKB), an important aspect of the Knowledge Life Cycle Framework. Specifically, she asked how the KLC and the DOKB notion, took account of the problem of disappearing human knowledge or “leakage” resulting from retirement. At the time, I answered that the DOKB has no trouble treating “leakage” as an aspect of change. I think this answer is right as far as it goes. But, on reflection, I also think a blog answering her question in more detail is a good idea, since there was hardly time in a seminar question and answer context to to do it even a minimum of justice.
I’ll begin with the Distributed Organizational Knowledge Base. I first formulated this idea towards the end of 1999, and placed it in the context of the KLC framework. Previously, I had been working with the notions of distributed and artificial knowledge bases in the context of enterprise portals, and I realized that there was no reason to limit the notion of distributed knowledge to IT products alone, or even to cultural products alone, and that I also needed to explicitly recognize changes in mental knowledge and information as outcomes of knowledge processing. So, I defined the DOKB as the configuration of all the mental and cultural knowledge in the enterprise. Later on, I found this notion too narrow since I came to view synaptic structures as biological structures and also noted that synaptic structures are changed by learning experiences. In short, biological structures can be modified as a result of organizational experiences and therefore I concluded that biological knowledge could be modified by learning, and impacted by KM.
This realization led me to today’s version of the DOKB as the continuing knowledge and information outcome of knowledge processing defined by the configuration of biological, mental, and cultural knowledge at any point in time. In my view, everyone in an organization draws on some aspect of the DOKB in acting and participating in all business processes, and the DOKB is always changing as a result of the operational business, knowledge production, and knowledge integration of people and collectivities in an enterprise. Therefore, as time passes, the DOKB changes. It loses knowledge and information, gains other knowledge and information, grows its stock of knowledge and information, and exhibits changes in the arrangement or configuration of the knowledge and information within it, and also changes in the attitudes, values, and other predispositions it reflects.
So, now we come to the idea of “leakage.” My DOKB notion surely allows for knowledge loss or “leakage” over time. Apart from the destruction of cultural knowledge in media, which can occur either unintentionally, or deliberately, or some combination of the two (e.g. someone can miscalculate about the need to destroy old documents and with them content that later turns out to be important), mental knowledge can be lost, because its synaptic basis is destroyed, or because the people who retain it, either biologically or in memory, leave the organization. In the normal course of events, losses of this kind will go on all the time. Attempts to track changes in the DOKB can, in theory, measure these losses. But, at present organizations attempt little in the way of measurement of changes of this kind. I’ve done some work on developing adaptive scorecards, and methods that would begin to measure changes of this kind. But work like this is just beginning and will take many years to institutionalize.
The idea of “leakage,” is closely related to the currently very hot issue of knowledge retention in organizations heavily staffed with “baby boomers” who are retiring, or are about to retire, and the problem is particularly acute in Governments at all levels. Some think that Knowledge Management can offer unusual, low-cost solutions to the knowledge retention problem that can be implemented within a short time frame, and prevent the large-scale loss of critical mental and biological knowledge, including special competencies and skills, due to retirement. I think efforts of this sort are a waste of time and money, and that KM and the DOKB, as I understand them, suggest that there is no “quick fix” to the knowledge retention problem, because mental and biological knowledge are not directly sharable, and creating capabilities that reflect similar structures of such knowledge seems often to require, creating similar experiences to those that generated the old “leaking” knowledge in the first place.
There is a longer-term incremental, fix of course. That fix involves application of the Ecological, Decision Interruption, and Expectation Gap approaches to KM. If all three are implemented, the cultural supports for greater redundancy in similar structures of mental and biological knowledge will be present. If, in addition, mentoring programs and occasional consulting from those soon to be or already retired are used, the frequency of serious problems due to knowledge “leakage” will decline. In short, I think that minimizing “knowledge leakage” and maximizing knowledge retention is a by-product of a comprehensive and long-term KM program. It cannot be a product of a short-term KM intervention, however determined, well-funded, and unusual it is in approach and method, because of the nature of mental and biological knowledge.