Knowledge Bits
Knowledge is fragmented and distributed. Centralizing knowledge is difficult because information changes too frequently and the location of truth is not certain.
Organizations have all kinds of methods of dealing with the chaos that is information management. Independently, these systems make sense, but these systems are anything but independent.
More ambitious organizations try to connect these systems with varying degrees of success. There is always some constraint and/or trade off.
The biggest constraint is that there is a lot of human interaction. Every human brings different bits of knowledge to the table, and not all of those bits can be captured by the system.
People see connections differently People make sense of data differently And most importantly, there is more than answer
There may be an optimal answer given the constraints and priorities of the process, but the constraints and priorities vary widely.
For the time being, we are stuck with messy world of knowledge bits, but it is better to recognize this reality than to pretend it doesn’t exist.