Yes, valuing knowledge and KM is hard and there won't be a single formula to do so.  So what I teach my students is to write a value story explaining the value you have determined and how you got there.  I tell them they may be right, they may not be right, but no one will know until they try and by writing the value story they give everyone else a place to start and comment on.  From this discussion we create a more refined value story and ultimately what the value is to our organization.  The problem for why there is no universal value story is that all organizations are a little different with different values.  No one story fits all.  My own research has validated about 20 measures that show where value in KM/knowledge use are generated..  I don't expect organizations to use all of them but rather a relevant subset comprised of those measures that are relevant to their context.  So, valuing is hard as it is organization specific.  If you'd like a copy of my paper let me know and I'll send it to you.....murray jennex

Yes, valuing knowledge and KM is hard and there won't be a single formula to do so.  So what I teach my students is to write a value story explaining the value you have determined and how you got there.  I tell them they may be right, they may not be right, but no one will know until they try and by writing the value story they give everyone else a place to start and comment on.  From this discussion we create a more refined value story and ultimately what the value is to our organization.  The problem for why there is no universal value story is that all organizations are a little different with different values.  No one story fits all.  My own research has validated about 20 measures that show where value in KM/knowledge use are generated.  I don't expect organizations to use all of them but rather a relevant subset comprised of those measures that are relevant to their context.  So, valuing is hard as it is organization specific.  If you'd like a copy of my paper let me know and I'll send it to you.....murray jennex

-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick Lambe plambe@... [sikmleaders] <sikmleaders@...>
To: sikmleaders <sikmleaders@...>
Sent: Wed, Aug 14, 2019 7:27 pm
Subject: Re: [sikmleaders] Identification of Potential Business Value

Hi Robert

The peculiarity (and the problem) in valuing information and knowledge is its context dependency. The same asset can be incredibly valuable in some circumstances, and worthless in others, with only minor changes in the environment. Moreover, the same asset can be an enabler in some circumstances and a disabler in others (Dorothy Leonard).

Edith Penrose (Theory of the Growth of the Firm, 1959) explored the challenge of valuing something with high but context dependent potentiality like capabilities and found herself at a loss for some kind of predictable formula. The Information Resource Management (IRM) movement in the 1970s tended to gravitate to the valuation of problems actually solved by information resources and systems - e.g. importance of decisions enabled (a loose equivalent of transacted value), while the core competencies movement (e..g. Gary Hamel and his KM followers) moved up the value stream by generalising to broad competences and looking at strategic goal alignment as a form of valuation. The intellectual capital movement aligned itself with the intangible asset accounting movement, and while it has a plurality of frameworks has failed, over 20+ years, (a) in getting a common model that can be widely adopted and (b) in explaining the transition between valuations high level strategic capabilities and how that value is constituted by its constituent granular information or knowledge assets.

In short, it’s a problem that has been beaten half to death, where the most useful and accepted work tends to be at high, strategic and aggregate levels, and the least convincing or useful work has been at the granular asset level. (One un-useful development of the IRM movement was to associate value with investment (cost) which led to the whole defensive "ROI of IM/KM movement" we still struggle with today) - completely ignoring the potentiality argument.

You mention the explicit/implicit conversion decision - one feature of that conversion is that in explicating implicit knowledge, you remove potentiality from it, you customise it towards specific applications. Max Boisot (Knowledge Assets) described the trade-off between the value of achieving scale and reach when you "explicitise" knowledge versus the loss of potentiality, adaptability and variety of application..

Now in terms of your specific question, whether or not to invest effort in converting something, I think the question should be less one of long term value/ potentiality, but more one of short term utility. Given our context now and the problems we have right now, how useful would it be to explicitise, versus the cost and foreseen volatility of this knowledge? This suggests being able to map the problem space, align with business needs and weigh up options and priorities. This is one of the things we do when we conduct knowledge audits. In that context, I guess the notion is closer to the IRM formula (value of problems solved). Except that I think “utility” is a better term to use than “value” (because “value” suggests the need/ability to put a number on something that can’t easily/accurately be numbered).

I hope that does not muddy the water over-much!

P

Patrick Lambe

Partner

+65 62210383

website: www.straitsknowledge.com

weblog: www.greenchameleon.com

twitter: @plambesg

Knowledge mapping made easy: www.aithinsoftware.com

On 14 Aug 2019, at 11:06 PM, Robert Bogue rbogue@... [sikmleaders] <sikmleaders@...> wrote:

Friends –

 

It was great seeing so many folks last week in Cincinnati.  

 

I’m pondering a problem for a whitepaper I’m writing and I’d love folks thoughts on it.  The short version of the question is “How do you assess the potential business value of an information asset?”

 

The longer form is in the context of how we need to help to separate the wheat from the chaff so that we can keep the information is the most valuable and discard (through retention schedules) the information that we no longer need.

 

I’m thinking about some interesting challenges.  Anything that has been converted from implicit knowledge to explicit should be elevated because of the investment that was made – in other words someone felt like this was important enough to convert it into an explicit piece.  I’m not entirely sure that I could separate the explicit from the implicit at scale and would love ideas on how to do this.

 

Similarly, I was pondering video interviews.  Last week we discussed that uploading a video to Microsoft Stream will automatically generate closed captioning which improves it’s findability.  Between that and the ubiquity of cell phones that can shoot video, it’s a great way to capture knowledge and to make it findable.  However, I began pondering whether we should retain the video file for the same length of time as the captions.  Do they have the same value?  If the information is high value one would expect that it might be converted into an explicit knowledge asset.  If it’s of lower value, then perhaps the best answer is to connect with the person who has the knowledge – which can be done with just the transcript.  Thoughts?

 

I’d love to hear folks thoughts along this line as I try to clarify my thinking.

 

Thanks.

 

Rob

 

-------------------

Robert L. Bogue

O: (317) 844-5310  M: (317) 506-4977 Blog: http://www.thorprojects.com/blog

Are you burned out?  https://ExtinguishBurnout.com can help you get out it.