Commentary -- Acquiring Information and Knowledge Using Software

Using software — both standalone and Web-based — for the typically costly and time-consuming task of gathering essential information and knowledge holds the promise of both reduced cost and better, more complete information. We are in the early stages of this endeavor, having developed and tested a number of basic tools in a limited range of field situations. Current efforts should yield a more complete array of essential tools and a clear picture of their applicability.

Consulting assignments typically follow a three-step process: information gathering, analysis, and application. Information gathering nearly always dominates the process in terms of time and cost because of the fundamental reliance on interviews and manual collection and review of documents. This is especially true for assignments dealing with strategic and top management issues. To keep these assignments affordable, most consulting firms employ teams of junior and generally inexperienced associates to handle the bulk of this effort. In fact, it is the leverage offered by such teams that produce most of the profits in a professional services firm.

After you have done this a number of times, and then supervised others who do the information gathering, you see the inefficiency and error-prone nature of the interview, transcribing of notes, and summarizing of documents process. Inexperienced people do not make the best interviewers unless carefully scripted by someone with expertise and experience. In many cases, they cannot imagine the right questions to ask based upon what the respondent says. They miss vital information because they do not know it is vital. They can misunderstand or misinterpret comments because the context is unfamiliar. The alternative — using a senior consultant to do the information gathering is not always either affordable or practical.

There is an equally important problem besides high cost: The willingness of people to be completely open and candid with an unknown interviewer. Interviews often produce partial, shaded, agenda-heavy content that can obscure some of the most important information.

Consultants have used computer programs for many years to handle various aspects of the information gathering process but mainly at the back-end — organizing data into databases, developing statistics, presenting data. Very little use is made at the information source end unless the source is a machine or computer. Consultants continue to rely upon face-to-face and phone interviews, paper questionnaires, and meetings to acquire information and knowledge from their primary sources (people).

Computerized questionnaires or surveys have found limited use in situations where the questions can be standardized and are relatively simple. More complex situations require flexibility in questioning flow and the ability to switch from one path to another based upon responses. This represents a kind of intelligence that must be built into software for use in anything but simple, standardized situations.

Artificial intelligence applications have been developed for a wide range of human diagnostic and input requirements — medical, legal, accounting, and similar applications being the most common and well-developed. These, however, demand a stable situation that can justify the high software development costs involved. They cannot deal with situations that vary from case to case.

Few consulting situations are alike. Most differ substantially in critical detail that must be captured to provide a reliable understanding and an effective solution or recommendation. This means that information gathering in most cases must be designed to accommodate the differences between situations and also between assignment objectives. To use software in these applications, the software must be highly flexible — enough in fact to produce a largely custom version for each situation. Without a very special software design, you simply cannot afford to tailor the software for each situation and need.

We have developed over the past several years a unique design that keeps the software program or application stable and relegates all changes to a tailoring script or template. The template, easy and quick to modify, allows the software to present different content for each situation.

There is another requirement: enough intelligence to adapt content and flow to responses given by the user. It must strip out irrelevant questions and present questions consistent with the user's answers. This capability is essential to keep the diagnostic and feedback tools short enough to be acceptable to most people.

A common perception is that a busy, high level manager or key person will be unwilling to sit down at their computer and fill in what amounts to a questionnaire. That may have been true until recently but, today, most managers and even executives deal daily with e-mails, data queries, collaborative software (like Lotus Notes) and a wide variety of other computer-based communications. Few are uncomfortable any longer with computer-based tools.

The key to motivating a manager or key person to complete a software diagnostic or feedback tool is making the use of their input sufficiently valuable. No one wants to waste time giving input that will be unused, used for a purpose not valued by the contributor, or where there will be no timely feedback of results.

So long as information contributors feel that their input will result in feedback — results — that they see as important and valuable to themselves, they will generally be willing to provide input. Good software makes the input process as painless as it can be in general but the real motivator is the chance to see what their input, and the input of others, says.

No matter what use will be made of their input, contributors should always receive some form of feedback that will be of interest and value to them.

Computer-based input tools can elicit information and knowledge that may not be accessible by any other means. People tend to be much more open and candid in electronic communications like e-mails than in face-to-face interactions. They will often provide extremely valuable information, insights, and knowledge electronically that they would not be comfortable providing to most interviewers.

Interviewers also have to deal with shaded, partial, agenda-laden input that may all but obscure crucial points. Much of this difficulty goes away when respondents are dealing with an agenda-free computer program.

Why did we choose not to make our core software Web-based as is the trend today? There are three main reasons:

Our standalone software is relatively simple and easy to maintain and evolve. It is flexible in terms of tailoring for each situation. It is fully secure because we use our own encryption scheme. And, our software can be used anywhere you can operate a computer — airport, plane, hotel, home.

There is one serious disadvantage to standalone software, however. Software is difficult to distribute by e-mail since many e-mail systems automatically reject messages with executable attachments. As a result, we are planning to add Web-based tools as the need and opportunity arises.

For those few of you who are not familiar with this distinction, information is data (raw input) organized into some sort of meaningful framework. Management reports are information. Knowledge, a level higher in the content hierarchy, is information with a description of how it can be applied. Information that is not useful is simply sterile content. But if you figure out how to use it in some manner that can be communicated and learned by others, then the information, together with its application, becomes knowledge. Discovering meaning in some part of a management report may become knowledge if what your discover can be applied and if you can communicate it to others.

PLEASE TELL US — Was this material of any value to you?