BUSINESS NEEDS TO MOVE BEYOND INFORMATION
Knowledge management
The dream of knowledge management has always been - implicitly or less so - to encode and leverage the experience of an organisation's most "knowledgeable", expert, valuable, irreplaceable people.
In reality, the most valuable knowledge of all (partly due to the difficulty of capture and even more difficult, encoding…) is that which in many ways implicit rather than explicit.
The most powerful information is in fact almost impossible to encode, and is therefore impossible to communicate and exploit.
This is critical, and not just for knowledge management professionals. As we can see above, the workplace reality creates a value blockage, in that the knowledge - perhaps we can call this information for greater clarity - that such systems are best equipped to handle is typically far less valuable, far more common and commoditised - albeit easy to encode and share - than that which would promote substantial advantage.
So, most knowledge management systems end up as archives, document management….lots of lip service paid, but more or less ignored in real day-to-day practice. The good stuff is personal, and social in nature. What we really need access to is not information – it’s experience, expertise and assurance. These we get from people.
Knowledge, for all practical purposes, is tribal.
CRM
The tainted dream of Customer Relationship Management, was that the capture and encoding of information about the behaviour of people would enable corporations (like giant, clumsy Geishas perhaps?) to anticipate their future behaviour, in particular their purchasing dispositions, in order to take best commercial advantage.
But as we saw with knowledge management, the most valuable information that a company could wish to own about a customer is private, and increasingly at the time of writing, jealously guarded, by the high-value customer in particular.
And correspondingly, the most powerful experiences that a customer may have shared with the business (or more commonly its representatives) are almost purely emotive. They can be told – as stories, if you like – but they are not usefully susceptible to encoding as knowledge. They cannot be meaningfully exploited.
How many meaningless - yet perfectly, from the direct marketing point of view, targeted, and in many instances well-intentioned - commercial communications do we still receive across all channels? Literally thousands each year?
What does this mean for business and its relationship with information?
There is value, there is meaning, there are powerful, loyal relationships, there is even commercial benefit. They're out there, by the ton. But none of this dazzling opportunity - not one ounce - can be manipulated as "information", or "knowledge", simply because it is not, except in the broadest, far too forgiving sense, susceptible to encoding. Information, at best, just points at it.
Clearly this has considerable implications for the role and value of information in today's and tomorrow's worlds.
But weren't we always just a little suspicious - less than 100% convinced, but never able to satisfactorily articulate our concerns - of the supposedly explosive and infinite value that "all that access to all that information" would actually turn out to represent?
Tribes and Trust - iTrust
Is there an endgame for business, information and the customer relationship?
Come through the Looking Glass with me, into the near-future … Meet Yasmin. The mobile in her hand has become a wand of remarkable range and power. Picture her browsing in a supermarket in the near future, perhaps helping out Mum by doing the family shop on a Friday evening before going out with friends.
Her phone (which is now connected to an always-on, high-bandwidth network) has a relatively simple set of features that enable it to read RFID tags and barcodes: in other words, to collect, organise and display information about any item for sale. As she trawls the aisles, before selecting any item for her basket, she checks the colour display of the phone.
If she gets a red light, for “stop”, the product goes back on the shelf and an alternative brand may be considered; if amber, for “wait”, she can either take the product, replace it, or request another level of information to be instantly sent to the display. If a green light appears, she selects the product without further hesitation. This process, far from increasing the time required for the shopping, often shortens it.
How is that? And what do the lights mean?
Yasmin’s family are shareholders in the biggest brand in the world, iTrust (“Where Responsible Business Meets the World”).
The service, a global organisation which has a still-growing global user-base of say 20,000,000 families and individuals, paying between €100 (or $100) and €300 (or $300 per year) as equal shareholders for access, has one simple proposition: it enables shoppers for any product or service to ensure that the corporation that owns the brand meets their own articulated individual trust standards.
It is an electronic trust service, or rather, THE electronic trust service. And its annual turnover is currently $4,000,000,000.
The biggest brand in the world, in the hands of 20,000,000 individuals.
The impact of iTrust?
Simple. Shoppers are empowered, with every purchase they make, to vote with their wallets for or against the commercial success of every corporation in the world.
Supported by the auditing and benchmarking capabilities of NGO’s, each one handling a different element of corporate trust, environment, food quality, accounting, welfare and so on, consumers simply select the values and standards they wish to reflect and support in all their purchases, configuring iTrust to automatically exclude or query those brands that fall below the appropriate benchmarks.
A number of services cluster around the core proposition, and more are added each year.
Yasmin’s family, for example, have configured the service to refer in real time to the various databases that carry their individual medical records – including all mild or severe food allergies and current medications, their health targets, the monthly budgets for groceries, entertainment and so on, the household diary, their travel and social plans.
Critically, the service also extends its trust services to offer a secure “infomediary” feature, thus acting as a smart representative for its shareholders that protects their anonymity against the hostile CRM softwares of the corporations.
iTrust is, unsurprisingly, uniquely equipped and positioned to enable its shareholders to connect with each other to form active, focused communities, networks of concern and conscience.
These groups form a further ring of influence and feedback for the iTrust system, as well as of course fundamentally impacting the way the participants experience and use the process of consumption. They often issue bulletins that alert contributors to the ethical or corrupt behaviour of the corporations they watch. Recommendations to buy are hardly less frequent than rallying cries to boycott.
Science fiction or fork in the road?
How far are we now – technically, attitudinally – from a reality featuring iTrust? Not that far. And note how the immense power of the network, combined with the decline in shared meaning, has sown all the seeds that were needed.
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