Valdis Krebs likes following back links to his work, in which he discovered:

Research reveals how knowledge is accessed within organisations:

• Employees brains 42 per cent
• Paper documents 26 per cent
• Electronic documents 20 per cent
• Electronic knowledge bases 12 per cent

(Source: The Delphi Group)

The complex knowledge held in people’s brains is what gives an organisation its competitive advantage. It is context sensitive and cannot be codified, written down and stored.

5 Creating a knowledge-sharing culture Government Communication Network

Well, that’s interesting.  What does it mean?

Valdis comments:

Not a good study for those who believe I/T solves everything. Too bad the year of the study was not given. But, given the source of the study, I would guess it is not before the internet became popular.

Brains vs. Bits Valdis Krebs, Network Weaving, Friday, August 25, 2006

That’s true, but what happens when we use IT and the Internet to connect employees’ brains?

Like its product, the company’s culture seems to be based on long-distance communication. Indeed, the most important internal business tool is Skype itself, particularly its instant-messaging system, Skype Chat. Its first advantage, says Mr Tamkivi, is “presence data”. You can signal whether you are out, busy, reachable elsewhere or free—and all your colleagues can see. An unanswered e-mail, by comparison, tells you almost nothing. If required, you can add a video-conference or phone call at the click of a mouse. Of particular value is the fact that Skype chats are not only encrypted but work only between people who trust each other—the best possible defence against spam. And chats allow lots of people—sometimes 50 Skype staff, Mr Tamkivi says—to communicate with each other, “for minutes or for years”. The chat history is instantly accessible to all participants: “try to achieve that with a long e-mail thread,” he says.

Communicating the Skype way Aug 17th 2006 From The Economist print edition

Note that Tamkivi doesn’t even bother to compare the communications Skype uses to face-to-face in-office communications. I do find it amusing that the kind of presence data he’s talking about sounds a lot like the old Unix rwho, but once a good idea, always a good idea, I suppose. And while this may all sound like a bunch of grad students, apparently it works, because this is the same Skype that recently got bought by eBay for $2.5 billion and has 113 million registered users.

I like following multiple links back and seeing when they inform each other. IT doesn’t solve everything, but when it helps people communicate, it can help, in this case with rapid development, company cohesion, and multiple hiring pools.

Maybe distributed open communications are good risk management.

-jsq