The KM Cure, Part 3: Knowledge Rot

This is the third of a series of posts about critical challenges facing most organizations that can be addressed using knowledge management principles and proven practices. The third installment addresses how to prevent outdated, inaccurate, conflicting, redundant, or missing Information.

Challenge

The challenge is how to keep knowledge current, accurate, available, and unambiguous. Problems arise due to information being:

• Outdated: Published content has expired or been superseded, but it is still available.
• Inaccurate: Published content was never accurate or is no longer accurate.
• Conflicting: Two similar versions of content are available with differing information, and it is unclear which is the correct one.
• Redundant: Multiple versions of the same content are being maintained.
• Missing: Important sites and documents that were once accessible are no longer available, with no obvious replacements identified or redirection to accessible sites.

Scenarios

The impact of knowledge rot is felt in all departments, functions, and businesses. Here are eight examples.

• Software Development: Multiple versions of code exist, and it is unclear which one should be used.
• Engineering and Manufacturing: Process documentation that was previously available is no longer accessible.
• Supply Chain: An obsolete list of suppliers is still available online and has been used instead of the current one.
• Service and Repair: Inaccurate repair procedures are followed leading to costly return visits and rework.
• Research: Multiple copies of research reports are being paid for and filed in disparate repositories due to redundant subscriptions.
• Sales: CRM systems have duplicate entries for some customers and orders and are missing entries for others.
• Law: The client database contains conflicting information about client contacts and case histories, and many links to legal precedents are broken.
• Knowledge Management: Content is lost due to a KM platform becoming defunct, repository content being removed or deleted, a KM site being repurposed or reorganized, or data becoming corrupted.

Root Causes

Knowledge rot occurs from one or more these causes:

• No structured processes for curating and maintaining knowledge are in place.
• Redundant or inaccurate content can be stored due to poor governance.
• Content is arbitrarily archived based on fixed time limits and becomes inaccessible.
• The provider of a site that hosted content ends the service, and the platform disappears, with or without warning.
• A content owner or site owner removes content.
• The focus of a site changes, either due to a change of focus by the content provider or due to a new content owner taking over the site, and previous content is no longer provided.
• The owner of a site decides to restructure or rename it, leading to a change in all URLs of the content on the site.
• A piece of content, while still accessible, is garbled or altered so that it is either useless or compromised.

Costs of Inaction

The costs of not addressing knowledge rot include:

• Poor decisions are made due to obsolete, inaccurate, or missing information.
• Errors, failures, and reduced quality result from unreliable information sources.
• Employees are frustrated by not being able to find information that was previously available, by finding multiple versions of information and not knowing which is correct, and by retrieving obviously outdated or corrupted information.
• Customers are lost due to poor sales and service.
• Competitive advantage is reduced due to the negative impacts to research, engineering, supply chain, and other key functions.

Ideal State

Organizations should actively maintain knowledge using the Five Cs of Knowledge Management:

1. Capture: Exactly one copy of all important content is collected and stored.
2. Curate: Content is regularly reviewed and updated, missing content is identified and replaced from archives, conflicting content is resolved, and redundant content is removed.
3. Connect: Broken links are found and fixed and all content is appropriately tagged.
4. Collaborate: Communities help identify content that needs to be updated, replaced, or removed.
5. Create: Updated versions of content are created and used to replace previous versions.

Relevant KM Components

To achieve the ideal state, these knowledge management components can be used.

1. Knowledge managers: Facilitate and directly use the Five Cs to maintain content.
2. Communities: Steward a body of knowledge by maintaining it directly or alerting knowledge managers to the need to update it.
3. Incentives and rewards: Provide incentives for maintaining content and alerting knowledge managers to the need to update it.
4. Content management: Manage the complete lifecycle of content to keep it current, accurate, and available.
5. Metrics and reporting: Regularly report on the state of content, including last updated date, last accessed date, broken links, content removed, and user feedback.
6. Threaded discussions and Enterprise Social Networks: Provide a way for users to report on missing, outdated, or incorrect content.
7. Archiving: Archive obsolete content while avoiding arbitrary archiving based solely on date and retrieve missing content from archives such as the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
8. Artificial Intelligence: Crawl repositories and sites seeking and correcting missing and redundant content, fixing broken links, and searching for newer versions that can be used to replace obsolete content.

Next Steps

Here is what you can do to prevent knowledge rot:

• Implement as many of the approaches and components listed above as possible.
• Use AI to continuously seek, identify, and remediate knowledge rot.

Resources

See also:

• Only You Can Prevent Knowledge Loss: How to Practice “Knowledge Archaeology”
• The Five Cs of KM