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The Appliance of Science
No, this isn’t an advert for a washing machine – it’s about the role that Knowledge Management (KM) can play within Insight Management and vice versa. The growing interest in KM has led to a great deal of academic work, and the development of a language that describes different key principles. The most helpful of these has been the recognition of two types of knowledge – Explicit and Tacit.
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Explicit knowledge refers to information that is recorded in documents, presentations or databases. It’s readily available for those who want it and know where to find it.
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Tacit knowledge is the information inside people’s heads – not just facts, but also ideas, principles, experiences and skills.
Effective insight management should involve the communication of explicit knowledge to people in such a way that it becomes tacit knowledge.
In the closeted world of research and analysis, there is an abundance of explicit knowledge, but Insight Management teams need to try and turn this into tacit knowledge wherever it is needed and can have the most effect within the organisation.
The communication of information
That’s why so much of our role is now built around communication rather than statistical or project management skills. In contrast, most Knowledge Management work involves capturing tacit knowledge as explicit knowledge. Information is recorded so that it is more accessible and can be more widely applied. Furthermore, most of the solutions have been IT-based, which explains the growth of a big industry with big budgets.
Although IT plays an important supporting role in Insight Management, it’s not a solution in its own right. Insight Management is about people – and managing customer insight is about getting the right information to the right people in the right format and at the right time. Only people can determine what is ‘right’ at each stage of this process. Turning explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge helps to ensure that the right information is selected and then applied in the right way.
Insight Management teams therefore have a responsibility for communicating shared knowledge so that it gradually becomes head knowledge as well. So perhaps we are actually leading the KM industry. The skills we are developing are the ones that KM will have to focus on in the future. Once the industry has solved the problems of turning that huge mountain of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, they’ll then have to turn their attention to making it tacit again!
