Knowledge Management – the “Middle Road” for Large and Small Businesses

If you’re a small business entrepreneur (like me), or managing a role in a large organization, you probably wake up every morning with a single, compelling question: “What’s the best use of my time today?” (And best use of time for the week, month, season ahead, etc.) For all of us, our time is the most valuable, and completely unrenewable resource.

So over the past three months – with a product launch on the horizon (we launched in late July; first book published by Mourning Dove Press, my new publishing company), my focus was – of all things – on databases. Particularly, on cleaning up my databases, transitioning to ACT! as the “main” data repository (instead of having duplicate contact cards in Outlook, for different taxonomy areas), and totally rethinking, rebuilding, and overall retooling our taxonomies.

>Everything that I learned about taxonomies, knowledge management, and data organization while at EagleForce, and then later at Viziant, is becoming real and important in the most meaningful way.

And by “meaningful,” I mean: This is where I’m spending my “time dollar.” Over the past three months, I and my associates have spent more time on the database than on ANY OTHER ACTIVITY – and there’s more to be done. (And there will ALWAYS be more to be done.)

We’ve put more time into the database than into the website, or even into our social media and public presentations. And we’ve done more head-scratching about how to organize our people-information than we’ve done about designing our website.

This is a really important point, because after teaching at both Marymount and George Mason University’s Applied Information Technology programs over the past two years, where the focus for each course was essentially on “business process transformation,” the one thing that we did not address was data management. That was always sort of a “sidebar.” As in, “let’s put in a user login system.”

That’s right. In teaching over nine different courses, at three major universities (and I’ll throw in the course I taught on Knowledge Discovery at Georgetown many years ago into this mix), not once did I encounter the practical and very real-world importance of really focusing on and managing the corporate taxonomy and databases.

We worked on taxonomy-development and knowledge population for the Air Force, and for a number of smaller accounts while at EagleForce. Again, the overwhelming time-intensity of the task hasn’t struck me until now – managing a much smaller, structured-data, information set.

Whenever I go back to teaching, and from now on, whenever I talk with teachers – especially in the business, IT, marketing, or related areas – I will in the future focus on the crucial role of getting the corporate taxonomies, or “world view” right. And putting people and other entities into the right taxonomies. And finding the right tools to manage the data, and to also integrate with the “communications” tools.

This is an important topic, and I’ll be returning to it as time goes on.

Note: This post has been ported in from its original home in the Alianna J. Maren blogger account (now defunct). Written originally on Sept. 1, 2011, ported on Feb. 14, 2014.