It occurred to me as I was reading this week’s articles that it would be interesting to frame the conversion of “data” to “knowledge” through the notion of employee engagement or employee loyalty.  One theme that seems to be emerging in class Krishna and Paul in particular, is that of not wanting valuable resources to walk out of the door.  Valuable resources being people and the information that is contained in their heads.  It is interesting to consider that both law firms and financial services firms illustrate Drucker’s notions of the Knowledge Worker.  If practitioners leave Goldman Sachs or Paul’s firm, there isn’t a machine in place to replicate the income created by these professionals.  It seems to me that everyone knows there is a “mercenary” attitude of professionals towards their own clients or revenue stream, but I have yet to see senior management factor this into decision making.

In another class I am conducting an analysis of the behaviors that make Relationship Managers (i.e. Sales People, Business Developers, Managing Consultants) successful at a professional services firm.  It seems to me that most professionals who are responsible for a revenue stream are navigating the changing waters of “Context”.  Those that are able to do this nimbly, tend to be the most successful.

If you take Davenport, Harris, De Long, and Jacobson’s perspective that “Context” is decisive–in their model it is the corners ton–and that there are several variables that comprise “Context” (Strategy, Skills & Experience, Organization & Culture, Technology & Data), then it follows that not all variables are weighted the same in each setting.  Part of what I gathered from this piece is that there is a skill that the manager must employ to assess which is weighted the most heavily and make decisions accordingly.  If the culture of the firm or company is changing, or the market is capricious, then it becomes challenging to determine the “Context”.

Why I raise the issue of loyalty or engagement is that it is easy to see why someone would choose to be loyal to themselves, or loyal to their client if the “Context” was dynamic regardless of the reasons “why”.  Either way it results in people not wanting to share data or information.  This hoarding of data or information does not lead to knowledge creation.

In May’s issue of Wired magazine, Dave Winer CEO of Radioland.com proud provider of Radio, wagered $1,000 that Weblogs will outrank the New York Times Web site by 2007 (based on a Google search of five keywords or phrases reflecting the top five news stories.)  He made this bet with Martin Nisenholtz CEO, New York Times Digital.

This presents an opportunity for us to BLOG!  I will try to create a hyperlink to Wired, but in case I don’t, here is a synopsis.

Each year Wired runs an annual “Betting on the Future” competiton with key industry folks.  What does it mean that Winer was included?

Winer briefly describes the changing economics of the publishing industry, and that the mainstream press determines a narrow scope of what is presented–usually only covering three main stories.  Weblogging came into existence as a response to the abundance of information available on the Web, but not published by the popular press.  Guerilla warfare tactics on Winer’s part?

Nisenholtz’s believes “Readers need a source of information that is unbiased, accurate, and coherent.  News organizations like the Times can provide that far more consistently than private parties can.  Besides, the weblog phenomenon does not represent anything fundamentally new in the news media.”

BLOG me with your thoughts, or if you are interested in wagering your own bet, I take Winer’s view.  We can make a bet that spans the time horizon of this class.  I don’t want to wait until 2007 to collect!