*Note: The following is from our archived collection of older documents, and may not reflect the most current information.

As we are quickly approaching the end of this decade, the 1990's have left us with tons of English business jargon: phrases like synergy, downsizing, benchmarking, even knowledge management (the New Big Thing). I'm sure the equivalent of these phrases do exist in the Japanese language. Mastering the grammar of modern management is the real point of entry into a dark and strange new world of business. The only limiting factor on the growth of business language is the power of human imagination. Management experts are producing new words and phrases at a rate that would surprise a microchip producer.

Out of all the management talk, though, we have gained new insight into the potential for human interaction and development within the organization. The topic of 1999 has undoubtedly been knowledge management. More books, reports, conferences and seminars have been produced on the subject of how to capture an organization's brainpower than on any other topic. The concept is simple, but you wouldn't know it from reading many business publications.

I am certain you all have heard or read various interpretations of knowledge management, this newest of business phrases. Allow me to offer my own. I believe that knowledge management is the process of locating, evaluating, capturing and sharing knowledge throughout an organization. It relies on establishing a methodology for collecting, evaluating and cataloging information, and making that information available for collaborative access by a wide variety of users and applications within the organization. Knowledge management is a practice that can lead to a more communicative, more successful, even more profitable organization. Within that practice, there are a variety of concepts that contribute to improved knowledge management.

Management of an organization's knowledge, or "intellectual capital," is just as important as management of financial assets. Allow me to digress for a moment on the concept of intellectual capital. There are four components in the concept: people, processes, material, and money. Without all four, management of intellectual capital, or knowledge, is difficult, if not impossible.

There is no longer a technical barrier to knowledge management; the technology to build an integrated, enterprise-wide system exists. The challenge in an established organization is to change culture and processes to make knowledge management as much a part of daily life as the conference table. And key to the process are incentives to keep new knowledge flowing into the intellectual capital pool.

The real value of intellectual capital is that it is the only sustainable advantage a organization can have in a competitive environment. When key employees leave, an organization typically loses the intellectual capital that person brought in, developed, even put into use. In the past, most organizations started over, bringing in new talent and making use of new skills and knowledge, plus whatever knowledge might have been shared with staff by departing employees. The goal in managing intellectual capital is to eliminate the "random knowledge acquisition" strategy and move towards actually collecting that knowledge and making it available -- and deploying it -- for an extended period of time.

EXAMPLE: In writing about the profitability of intellectual capital, Tom Brown referred to the Swiss breakthrough of using quartz in watchmaking. He noted that the Swiss, unfortunately, did not capitalize on this new discovery due to technological constraints. But Seiko and Texas Instruments took advantage of the discovery, pushed the technological limits, and seized the profits. Brown stated that, "Intellectual capital, undeployed, is like any other asset undeployed. It's gold un-mined." ("Ringing Up Intellectual Capital," Management Review, January 1998, p. 47.)

As workplace technology has become easier to use and more intuitive, organizations have begun to focus on what they need to know and how it ties to their overall business strategy. A significant factor in this philosophy is the belief that technology products no longer bring value; it's what the products deliver that brings value. It has become quite obvious that there is no direct correlation between investment in information technology and the performance of one's organization. Numerous studies have reflected this view of late.

The world is slowly grasping the understanding that technology-enabled information systems are not the same thing as technology-enabled knowledge management systems. Information is NOT knowledge. Information is a vital tool in a linear world where change is predictable and management's mission is to optimize the organization. This is NOT the case today. Information remains vital to any organization, but it is no longer enough to merely possess the ability to quickly and easily transfer information. It must be fermented into a more quality product. Information must be managed by professionals who know how, where, and why to use it.

The next great productivity gain in the workplace will come from effective systems for reusing intellectual capital. There's really no other way to go. Organizations have exhausted the ability of employees to work more hours or to bill more. Productivity has to come from using intellectual capital more efficiently. The challenge is to find ways to leverage the intellectual capital that resides in people's heads and on paper. That can be difficult in any profession. Practitioners have to define the framework for knowledge. They must ask themselves, "What is knowledge and how should it be structured in the organization?" Then people have to be constantly encouraged to create more intellectual capital.

One of the quick reactions of many executives, senior managers, and even many information professionals is to focus on trying to measure intellectual capital. I think this is a commendable idea, given that the International Accounting Standards Committee recently approved a standard that allows an intangible asset to be recognized in a financial statement. Now, intellectual capital can be more than a buzzword; our organizations can place a legitimate value on the work we produce!

But measuring and articulating such a fluid dimension within an organization is likely to be frustrating, and can be a time and resource waste. Measurement of all the intellectual capital in an organization is probably impossible. In fact, knowledge management itself is a bit misleading, because knowledge can't be truly managed. But we can manage the organizational culture so that it optimizes the use of knowledge. The primary goal of any knowledge management activity, in any organization, should be to bring immediate value to the customer. Too often we see companies getting distracted by yet another new management trend without actually putting it into practice. And isn't that the ultimate objective of any new theory in the working world -- to see practical benefits? Wasted energy over grand concepts and complicated tools don't do anything to make a difference with the customer. The same should be true in attempting to maximize intellectual capital. To properly manage this form of knowledge, one must understand that it is a social activity, not just an exercise in library science. Any way you cut it, people are at the heart of creating and using knowledge. They create insight, judgment, and innovation, based on experience, investigation, passions, and good old-fashioned brainstorming. While electronic communication is critical, it cannot substitute human interaction through face-to-face meetings. In order to exchange knowledge, trust must be developed between individuals. The closer we get to face-to-face learning, the greater the impact of the knowledge gained

Communities of knowledge are patterned, predictable, social structures that can be energized or blocked by the actions of the organization. Without care and concentration, management of intellectual capital can become another of what has been a long line of diversions that takes away from the organization's true focus. But by developing a culture and organizational roles and responsibilities that lend to a knowledge sharing environment, senior managers and executives can open up the social structure in their organizations to all employees who, in turn, get the most out of their performance. Thus, the organization gets the most out of its employees.

If organizations are going to fully capitalize on their intellectual capital, they must devise systems for quickly compiling and retaining implied knowledge, building intellectual inventories as individuals continue to learn, and making these assets instantly available to the people who need them. Part of this process is building a knowledge repository. A knowledge repository might house transcripts or audiotapes from strategic planning sessions, consultants' reports in text or multimedia formats, videotaped presentations, market-trend analyses and any number of information-rich resources.

Knowledge stored in digitized form can be processed, indexed, searched, sorted, converted, retrieved and transmitted relatively easily and cost-effectively.

This sounds like a job for a special librarian!

But we as information professionals should beware the urge to index everything. It is easy to visualize a huge database of employee knowledge, accessible to everyone on staff; but what frequently happens is that the huge database becomes a huge database problem. We should not lose sight of the core interpersonal dynamics of people at the heart of knowledge management. In whatever strategies you develop for managing intellectual capital, keep the capital where it belongs: in the humans that own it. Here's a perfect example of an appropriate mix between collecting knowledge and keeping it at the source. IBM consultants routinely share ideas and solutions with one another through their own networks of professional contacts. But with thousands of consultants deployed across the globe, the informal networks can't possibly embrace the breadth of the organization's expertise.

IBM's response is to maintain dozens of knowledge repositories that correspond to the various specialized services that its consultants provide. Each repository contains intellectual capital - project proposals and work papers, engagement summaries, presentations and reports, process maps, software solutions and so forth. Consultants pursuing a new business opportunity anywhere in the world can search the repositories for relevant information to help them develop stronger proposals. Practitioners engaged in a client project can mine the repositories for solutions to specific problems. The standardized format for new project plans forces consultants to indicate how they intend to reuse intellectual capital to execute an assignment. Afterward, consultants must specify in standard summary reports how they used existing knowledge resources to serve the customer and what new intellectual capital they have contributed to the repository. IBM found that this process reduced the time spent preparing proposals by as much as two-thirds and shortened the development of client deliverables by as much as 60%. By leveraging the knowledge of their peers, a smart organization knows what it knows -- and swift deployment helps it reap the full benefit of that insight.

Of course, we can't merely rely on organizing content and hoping it will take care of itself! Maintenance is likely to be the most important factor in the usage of intellectual capital . Without keeping the information fresh and useful, employees and clients will stop depending on it. And then we're off to consider the next hot trend for improving organizational processes. In 84 percent of high-impact applications of intellectual capital, managers make an ongoing investment in content creation and maintenance, according to a recent study conducted by Teltech Resource Network Corporation. Those surveyed suggest that two types of people are being used to achieve the objective: those with the skills to extract, organize and manage the content; and subject-matter experts usually (found within a business unit) who decide what goes into the content. Conversely, fifty percent of low-impact applications did not include investments in content maintenance. Senior managers know what they need, but they often don't realize the best methods for filling those needs. That's where our profession must take action!

We as information professionals must strive to play a greater role in the culture of our organizations. Our success -- individually and collectively -- depends greatly on our integration into the knowledge management process. At the core of the integration process, we must develop an awareness of the existing knowledge culture within our organizations while seeking to redefine problematic areas. We must work to not only collect the intellectual capital from various business units and the individuals within them; we must also seek to develop trust with those individuals so that we and they can achieve a greater understanding of each other'a needs. That trust will produce results in the form of meta-knowledge -- the awareness of the benefits of sharing knowledge throughout the organization.

How do we ensure that the librarians and information professionals of the future will adequately grasp and understand successful knowledge management practices? Through a combination of changes in the structure of their formal education AND strong continuing education during their careers. For knowledge management is a concept that can be engrained into a student's mind at the university level, but the practical applications of knowledge management must be continually reviewed, changed, and retooled in order to effectively meet the needs of our organizations. Many library and information science programs are already educating their students on the theoretical aspects of knowledge management. The next step is to actually provide case studies on actual library-oriented practices that will give the student insight on the impact on the user and the organization. Ultimately, though, organizations like the Special Libraries Association must continue to train our members on the evolution of knowledge management, since Universities cannot possibly keep pace with the rate of change at the organizational level.

Two years ago, a group SLA members and staff worked together to produce a very interesting document that you may have seen: "Competencies for the Special Librarian for the 21st Century." This piece has been hailed as a seminal work in defining the role of our profession in the future. It outlines the critical competencies special librarians must develop in order to succeed in the knowledge age and act as agents of change in the new millennium.

These competencies take into account the shifts taking place in the field, including the transition from paper to electronic media, the increasing demand for accountability, and the new settings in which special librarians work. We, as special librarians, must constantly build our knowledge and skills to keep up with these shifts. To accomplish these new functions, competencies that encompass knowledge, understanding, skill, and attitude must be acquired and nurtured.

The Competencies document suggests the existence of an evolution of the information professional into a new breed. I challenge you today to embark on a new path in your career, to question the standard ways you've always done your job, to always ask yourself: "Is there a better way to do this?" "If something doesn't work, why do we continue to do it?" "Will practices that currently work continue to do so in the future?"

The Special Libraries Association is dedicated and committed to assist in the evolution of the profession, and we look forward to guiding our international membership into the new millennium with improved competencies, new attitudes, renewed vigor, professional growth and a place to feel and be special. You -- the people who make up the profession -- will determine its future course, and I look forward to seeing all of you succeed. Thank you!