Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Tuesday Night Takeaways – My Random Thoughts from Class (5/14/02) One of my biggest takeaways from class was Walt Henderson’s distinction between knowledge and information. While I know Jim has been hesitant about defining knowledge and information and is probably cringing that this was a takeaway for me, but this helped to clarify some of the concepts we are discussing in class. For the record, I took away that Walt defined information is patterned data; something that has value. Knowledge is the using of patterned data; knowledge has humans involved; it is in the interpretation/filtering of information, based on experience. The second key takeaway for me was that knowledge becomes obsolete incredibly fast. We have spent time in class discussing building a knowledge management system/process, but how do you maintain it? More importantly, how do you decide when to remove obsolete information? Not sure if I completely agree with the statement in the article that you need to fail to learn. I think many people learn by analyzing someone else’s mistakes (case studies, for example). The key is that you have to acknowledge that those same mistakes could happen to you if you were in a similar situation. In hindsight, many people would say that they would have never shredded those documents the way that Andersen did. But to learn from that mistake, I think you have to put yourself in the same situation, with the same revenue pressures and client demands and the same historical relationship. In that scenario, I think some people would have done the same thing. The key learning is how to avoid a similar situation. 9:25:07 AM

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