Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Shaozhou,
The role of the CIO is two fold: First, he develops and implements the strategy for information sharing, exchange, flow throughout the company fitting in with the company's overall strategy. The corporate strategy defines the company's mission in terms of markets, customers, technology, and manufacturing over a 3 to 5 to 10 (to 250, in the case of Matsushita) year horizon. The CIO makes a plan for the company's computer systems, data bases, and tools to support that corporate vision.

The CIO's second role, which has become very important today, is security; to protect the prietary information the company generates from competition or other people who might like to see the company harmed or benefit from knowing this proprietary information.

As far as the difference between information and knowledge, first it's useful to define the two:

INFORMATION simply is bits of data arranged in a fashion to give meaning. This includes financial data such as a company's manufacturing costs, profit, or employee records. Information is managed in terms of storage, flow/exchange, capabilities to manipulate with tools such as statistical packages like SPSS or packages like Business Objects produces to summarize data.

KNOWLEDGE is the conclusions one derives from information. It's the extension of various pieces of data to develop something new and different. For instance, data or information is historical sales figures for various regions of the world. The process of creating knowledge is to analyze that data, develop trend and seasonality models, and then building your distribution and production capabilities and policies to support the model with the right inventory of products in the right place, thus optimizing inventory costs and increasing company profits. The knowledge is the KNOW-HOW of looking at the data in the right way and then knowing about manufacturing, distribution, logistics, and company profit calculation and defining the inventory levels and distribution to optimize costs and profit. Knowledge management is the process of documenting the knowledge so that it is information. The goal of knowledge management is to document the process of innovation in all disciplines of the company such that it is not dependent on an individual and can be replicated. This is very difficult because it can involve how a person thinks and how the brain works. For instance, I listened to a CEO talk about the development of his company's strategy within the medical devices market. He looked at the situation taking into account his company's competancies and the market needs combining many methods of analysis. He layed out the entire process in front of several hundred businessmen. This is KNOWLEDGE. You may think that making this public is a big risk because now anyone can replicate it and attack his company. However, the TRUE knowledge comes from his unique exerience, education, and personal make-up. I could never be able to look at the same data and the same set of tools, and draw the same conclusions and derive the same action plans and strategy. While he documented the information and process, he hasn't documented his entire background which enabled him to be able to do what he did. The parts of the knowledge he did document and share is helpful, however, because someone else with a different unique background within his company can extend that knowledge into new knowledge by processing it differently. And it helps to preserve that knowledge into the future; when he stops being CEO, that knowledge will remain within the company for future use.

I hope this helps you!

Wayde

Agree with Wade, that's got to be just about the perfect response!

Nothing to add except to say it's important that the Information/Knowledge strategies should be driven by the corporate, business and marketing strategies.

In almost all businesses, IT is an enabler, not necessarily a strategy centre in its own right. The exception is in the IT industry, where the system IS the message!