By Bain McKay
Corporate knowledge management solutions today focus on content management. But without automated learning management, content cannot be productively leveraged for corporate value. Automating integrated learning and content management can be a powerful corporate management tool that facilitates sustainable business value.
What is IQ?
IQ measures our ability to respond quickly to domain specific questions, reflecting how well we can assimilate knowledge. It measures our ability to acquire knowledge, not the knowledge itself. Yet both a knowledge base and the ability to build on a knowledge base to create and leverage expertise are essential components for successful knowledge management applications.
Most knowledge management products today focus only on content management. Few address learning productivity. And very few indeed address both in concert. Yet studies show that corporate competitive success can be measured by collaborative competency, reflecting the ability of corporate user groups to work together in a productive, collaborative fashion, learning and sharing knowledge efficiently to gain market advantage. Corporate IQ represents the collaborative competency of corporations.
Corporate plasticity: carving the circuitry of cognitive knowledge
To appreciate how we can capture and harness corporate IQ automatically, it will help to understand how IQ works from a neurological perspective.
Brain plasticity represents the ability of the brain to wire itself incrementally, building new knowledge circuits between neurons that associate learning experiences with experiential knowledge. Knowledge recall comes from our ability to match incoming sensory patterns, be they auditory, visual, or otherwise, to similar circuit patterns already mapped in our brains.
Our ability to perform knowledge functions quickly reflects the measure of our IQ, as enabled by our genetic predisposition, continued practice, and our experiential knowledge base as a knowledge substrate on which we can build. The domain focus of our experiential knowledge base necessarily results in IQ measurements being domain specific.
Corporate IQ is a measure of corporate ability to leverage experiential knowledge as articulated in document repositories, and to build, share, and collaborate new knowledge productively. Collaborative competency, as a result, becomes the engine of corporate IQ management, facilitating corporate knowledge plasticity.
Churning the collective brain of the corporation
Users leverage tacit and explicit knowledge for business value by writing targeted documents that facilitate business projects. Project documents thereby represent more than the transactions of business; they represent the knowledge substrate upon which new knowledge is created and existing or experiential knowledge is shared and leveraged.