Making Knowledge Visible: Communicating Knowledge through Information Products

Citation

Calvert, P. (2005), "Making Knowledge Visible: Communicating Knowledge through Information Products", Online Information Review, Vol. 29 No. 6, pp. 688-690. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520510638151

With this book, Elizabeth Orna has introduced the term “information products” to the discipline of information and knowledge management. It is not a new concept; indeed, it could be argued that it is as old as the oldest manuscripts, but used in the context intended by Orna it is an original contribution and one that merits considerable attention.

Her argument is that it is only through information products (IPs), such as books, reports, email messages, spreadsheets, videos, web sites, and I suppose webcasts, that information is communicated by an organisation. The communication is either internal, for the better use of information by all the workforce, or external, to inform customers and external stakeholders about what the organisation is doing or intends to do (though Orna excludes advertising from her definition of an IP). So, although librarians work with information products, to use her definition, it is largely within organisations such as government departments and commercial concerns that IPs are most significantly studied.

The relevance of the IP concept to knowledge management (KM) will quickly be apparent to anyone familiar with knowledge management theory or practice, for it is by using IPs that users meet the information they need, and in so doing, access the knowledge of others. As was mentioned before, this can be an internal process that is essential to the flow of information and knowledge, and this is how knowledge is disseminated within the organisation.

After a lengthy explanation of her definitions, Orna addresses the place of IPs within the organisation. She explains that IPs should always be used to support established business objectives. Anything ‘off the wall’ is a waste of resources. She shows how IPs help an organisation to interact with its stakeholders, and there are some useful short case studies provided to illustrate this point. Then she discusses how IPs can add value to the organisation and, intriguingly, how they can even subtract value. On this latter point she says, “examples of information products that subtract value are unfortunately a good deal commoner than cases of the opposite process”. Reasons for subtracting value range from poor outputs that just waste resources, through those that are so inaccurate they must be corrected, those that lose customers, to those that are so poor they are harmful to society. As usual, Orna gives cases to support her points.

The third part of the book deals with the practical aspects of integrating IPs, and this covers the technology infrastructure, as one might expect, but also the importance of the “management” in KM. A third factor she introduces is the idea of “information design”, which in some ways sounds close to information architecture, which shows how the terminology is far from settled yet.

She concludes with what she calls “action for IP value”. Here, she suggests an information audit. Conducting an information audit is usually found to be of considerable benefit to an organisation, but they are not simple operations to run, so in addition to this book, I suggest the interested reader also reads another one of Orna's books, Information Strategy in Practice (Gower, 2004) for more about the information audit.

This is such a “neat” book in many ways that I found myself picking it up again and again just to flip through and read paragraphs almost randomly. There was always something worth reading whatever the page. It contains numerous simple illustrations that visualise some of Orna's ideas about information flow and the role played by IPs. There is a good index but no bibliography (I suppose because this is considered to be such a new subject that there is no significant prior literature). I recommend it to anyone involved with KM, with document production in an organisation, web content managers, and IS and LIM academics.