What do you know ?

For anyone who isn't convinced that we are faced with information overload, here is one startling statistic from the University of California at Berkeley – the world produces between one and two exabytes (one exabyte = one billion gigabytes) of unique information per year, which is about 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth.

Only about 0·03% of the total information stored in the world is on paper. "It has been suggested that 60% of all business decisions are now made by e-mail," notes Catherine Hare of the School of Informatics, Northumbria University. "But if the information is important it needs to be put into a record format," she adds.

All of which highlights a very large problem faced by just about any organisation – how to deal with the information. What needs to be turned into official records for legal or business reasons? What tools can be used more effectively to improve business practices? What can just be scrapped? And what can be turned into meaningful knowledge?

Hare says: "Of all the records that are kept in a business, the financial records are probably the most straightforward because all of the procedures are laid out in law. In most other cases, it is a business decision as to which records to keep and how long to keep them for. The records are part of the business process, so it is important that they relate to the business core activities." One of the records that can be an ongoing bug bear for engineering and service companies is the time sheet. "It is important to make the system easy to use," states David Brohn of JMS, a company that develops software for job management and enables time sheets to be filled in through a web browser.

Internet problem and solution
"With this system you can compare projected costs to actual costs and see how each job is performing on a daily basis. This is in contrast to conventional methods where it can be a long time before the information comes together – often too late to recover," he adds.

This is just one example of how advances in technology and the growth of intranets and the Internet help manage information, as well as contributing to the increase of information to be dealt with. Related to this is the desire to make the best use of the information available through what has become known as knowledge management.

Knowledge management has become downright fashionable recently and there seem to be several reasons for this. "Most companies now have an intranet so they start to think about what they could do with it," suggests Steve Lockley of NBS Informatics Group.

At consulting engineers Roberts & Partners there was a perceived problem with duplication of effort and information because of staff being spread across five UK offices and two overseas offices.

From these decisions it was decided that the mechanism should be website based. "We created a website that can be accessed by anyone in the company using a web browser," says Robert's Mike Stephens. "Each person can set up their own profile and register to receive alerts when information they have an interest in is posted on the site. Also, anyone can upload information, though it is checked by the person for that subject sector before going live."

Sharing the knowledge
Consultancy FaberMaunsell has taken a similar approach, to disseminate information between a lot of people – and the basis of that dissemination is an intranet. "When Oscar Faber came together with Maunsell the intranet was very important as an administrative tool in providing a central pool of information and we are now taking that forward," says the company's knowledge manager Lawrence Waldron. "Everyone has a different view of knowledge management so we decided to talk to the staff to find out what they would want from such a system, rather than imposing a system on them from above." One of the problems faced by those with responsibility for gathering knowledge is extracting the information from colleagues. "Engineers tend to finish one project and move straight on to the next, so they have very little time to share information," says Michele Field, Buro Happold's building services knowledge manager. "We are still at the stage of information management, rather than knowledge management, and are in the process of creating a central enquiry point, so at the very least we know who knows what. Once the information is in place we can move to more knowledge management," she predicts.

Information management and knowledge management are two very different things, though the latter is dependent on the former to a great extent. It's also the case that most companies don't get any further than information management.

One of the people promoting the benefits of true knowledge management, though he prefers the term knowledge development, is Eric Ostrowski of the multi-disciplinary consultancy E C Harris. He divides the process into four stages; data, information, experience and knowledge: "The data may come in a number of different forms, such as magazine articles, figures from a project etc," he notes.

"All of these have limited value on their own, so you get these similar things together and aggregate them to provide information. The trick is then to tidy up the information and push it through the experience of experts inside or outside the business , and then capture what comes out at the end. That's knowledge," he explains.

In practical terms this involves approaching a particular subject and setting up a small group of people who have expert knowledge of that subject. They are then provided with relevant information and asked to comment, those comments forming the basis of the knowledge. For example, the relevance of the recent amendments to Approved Document L of the Building Regulations varied from one discipline to another within EC Harris but all staff needed to know something about it. In applying the four-stage process, Ostrowski came up with a document that summarised each amendment and its significance, to the extent that any engineer could gain reasonable knowledge of the subject within around 15 minutes.

So why does he prefer the term knowledge development? "What you are doing is developing something new from the morass of information, whereas 'management' sounds like all you're doing is putting all the information into a big, state of the art, highly organised filing cabinet," he suggests.

In all of these cases, the intranet forms the basis of the stored information and/or knowledge but it's also important to ensure that the system is user friendly. "The intranet is a key tool for sharing information around but it also contains a huge amount of information so it has to be easy to find what you want," warns Michele Field. "But once people have experienced it they immediately see the value of it."

Brain power is the best
The experience at Roberts & Partners was very similar, with a slow take up initially but an increase in usage as people found the intranet helpful: "We used a number of mechanisms to promote it, such as screensavers and an e-mail newsletter," recalls Mike Stevens.

An intranet also forms the basis of the Armstrong Pumps solution, though the company has really embraced IT in a big way. "We needed a way to collate the little pools of knowledge that exist in our own people, in our suppliers and our customers – so that the information and knowledge all comes together to meet an identified need," explain Patrick Caiger-Smith, managing director of Armstrong Pumps. "The intranet forms the backbone and we are using video conferencing, webcasts, sharing of documents online and any other mechanism that helps us get fast-track solutions," he adds.

Where information is to be shared electronically, there is a lot to be said to having a common format, which is the goal of NBS Information Group. "We would like to be giving people knowledge but at the moment we are giving them information and the tools to mine it," notes Steve Lockley. "Our goal is to support the design decision making process but to do that we have to get information into a codified form where we can use it rationally. For example, if you look at the British Standards there are big holes and contradictions so you have to try to get this information to a state where you can apply computers to it. The more you use knowledge-based systems the more you realise what the problems are with the information."

So it is very clear that knowledge can only be achieved by dealing with accurate and easy to understand information, which in turn comes from reliable data.

Technology is a big part of the problem of information overload, but it is also part of the solution. It can't necessarily carry out the conversion of information to knowledge – that requires the experience and judgement of the old fashioned human brain.

However, without technologies that allow information to be shared quickly between people all over the world, the accrual of knowledge would be a much slower process.