Gosh! If you made it this far in the 3 part series, you deserve a tip.

What do you carry around with you all day that is so valuable and you never have enough of it?

Answer: Your Attention.

Your attention is valuable because things, people, or places require your attention. You constantly pay into it, or things, with your attention and because it is a scarce resource it is precious. And, so as not to waste it, the focus on knowledge, its acquisition and quick assimilation is critical to your success. Knowledge realization will optimize or aid you in making the best use of this finite resource called “Attention”.

From Part I of this series, “How do you use knowledge as opposed to indiscriminately discarding it as an asset?” Well again, I have to come back to the issue of costing it out. If you have been in your profession for ten years, you are probably earning 3 or 4 times what you earned when first starting out. So how do you justify the difference? It can be explained by the accumulation of company specific knowledge or if you are in business for yourself, everything you learned by being in business. Investing in that learning experience to become more functional and effective does not show up in direct costs. Everything from company gossip, meetings, phone calls, conferences and yes errors made and corrected.

I know, you are going to call this “company overhead”. Not something customers are willing to pay for. There is another way of looking at this though. Call it the money spent on the accumulation of company specific knowledge capital. I doubt human resource departments even think of it in these terms. But if your ten years of experience is anything, including periodic investments in your training, you are worth more than you are being paid. Since this is the case, your company or the company you work for can recover its investment in knowledge capital as incremental profits. The only way this may fail is if you took training that is not relevant to your job or the skills being taught and practiced are obsolete. No value is added in these cases.

Given the nature of the Web, Open Systems Software and the structuring of data in a virtual workspace, the amount of knowledge coming on-line and the accumulation at a faster and faster rate, only serves to reinforce the notion of leveraging this capital. Indiscriminately throwing away these assets can be as simple as discarding software or deleting a spreadsheet. Another way, and I have seen this happen so many times is the loss of an employee. When the employee leaves the enterprise, so goes some capital. Of all the ways we can lose or discard knowledge assets, much of it resides in digital form totally unstructured, sometimes difficult to find and most of the time since it is digital you have knowledge lockout. You have to open the document and read it. It cannot be queried for knowledge or searched contextually. You want to have your business intelligence at your finger tips otherwise it is going to take up some of your attention. Before you can use knowledge you have to be able to get at it. And before you can get at it, knowledge must be accumulated.

Software is a significant store of a corporations knowledge capital. However, you must recognize first, the fundamental change in how the masses view the term software. Even fairly sophisticated business people have a consumer grade orientation. You have the basic MS Windows OS with your office suite, email and a couple of specialty applications. We have been sold on the idea that we are managing information. When the OS changes, which never co-incidents with changes in technology, your organization or business practices, you end up dumping the old version, wasted software expense, converting your old documents and data to buy the new. That is the discarding of an asset containing perhaps unrecoverable knowledge.

The fundamental change that has been occurring is that data, used by new software application paradigms (Open Source Software built to Open Standards), is becoming structured and software being constructed today must have a high residual value (i.e., reusable) and be a low maintenance capital asset. So what you really need to do, is evaluate the size and quality of your software portfolio. If you have not given any thought to this, chances are you are under utilizing all those millions of lines of code. A software portfolio will give you the means to think about it as an asset that can be managed. And this is the opportunity for you to accelerate the accumulation of knowledge capital. Knowledge capital is the encapsulation of accumulated expert knowledge capable of preserving an enormous amount of information. The knowledge asset should be managed so that it keeps growing steadily, safely and reliably.

As long as software is viewed as a expense that must realize short-term returns, corporations will be paying over and over for similar business function without the benefit of reuse. You will never make that shift from what we presently call management of information, viewed as technical efficiency, to an asset management perspective. The expense of acquiring information capabilities must change to become a means for gaining knowledge capital.

You will not be able to make this transition until your mind set changes. And the reason most people cannot realize there is a transition to be made is there is no easy way to make information and knowledge an explicit measure of performance. It does seem intuitive that once we know our knowledge assets, we can now build strategies, utilize tools and decision support systems to use and put that knowledge to work.

In closing, when I am talking about converting your real estate data into a structured (knowledge representative) form, i.e., exposed PropertyBanks in an RDF file, (see my activerain.com blog on PropertyBanks) this is only one area or component of the big KM picture. However, accumulating knowledge is like compound interest. Its organization and ease of access returns incremental performance when you are more competitive, quicker with the complex solutions for customers, can give the best customer service and operate more efficiently. Knowledge Capital does not solely exist in the minds of employees. It may also occupy a mind-share in customers who have spend their time and money to learn about your products and services.  I hope you have enjoyed this perspective series.