Managing Knowledge as a Marketing and Management Tool

The road to knowledge management, now well-traveled, seems to end with the science of acquiring and retrieving data. The end of that road, which was built mostly by the brilliance of computer scientists, stops where a clear understanding of the meaning of useful knowledge begins.

But with the growth of knowledge management as a discipline in many aspects of professional practice, some definitions may help forge a new direction for knowledge management that not only move the subject to a new realm of discovery, but may help find ways to make knowledge more useful as a management and marketing tool. We now seem to know a lot about gathering data, and are learning to turn data into knowledge. Knowledge must now be adapted to work for the firm, and especially for the firm's marketers.

Understanding information allows you to focus your management and marketing efforts to meet the specific needs of managing a firm, improving productivity, and designing marketing programs to meet the needs of specific markets. Well-founded information can make the difference between management and marketing effectiveness, and wasteful and expensive efforts, with a lower return on the investments of time and capital.

What Is Information?

First we know that data is not information, and information is not knowledge. Data, we know, are basic facts—unalloyed, with little or no value outside their own existence. To say, for example, that a tree is a tree merely defines that object. It says nothing of its structure, its purpose, its value. It tells us nothing about forests or forestry, or uses of its leaves or trunk. That a tree is a tree is data, not information.