The Cost of Knowledge
In “Being Digital” Nicholas Negroponte, Director of the MIT Media Lab, recounts citing the value of his laptop at between one and two million USD. “The point is that while the atoms were not worth that much, the bets were almost priceless.” This is about the value stored within the laptop.
A difference in valueing knowledge is that the source theoretically still holds it when it is shared. It can be said to be a collective good in that it can be shared with everyone. It might even help me to give you my information as your different perspective might give me new insight. This is really how internet protocols are developed in that a RFC (request for comment) is sent towards the development community where it is discussed.
Some value is highly linked to timing and circumstances e.g. insider trading. Information is also not really like physical goods in that once I have it I do not want more of it. It also doesn’t get used up (you need to keep that in your head firmly!). A lot of value in relation to information comes from the transaction costs, meaning the finding, creating, internalizing of information.
To assess the value of information you will either need to have it or have high trust in the source. It depends on relevance, quality and validity. Another option is to just not get information from one source but from several to get a complete picture, something that is evolving in blogging now. You read the New York Times for the one place to get the info, knowing that it has been published in relation to high journalistic standards. With a blog you will likely read several until you fully make up your mind, being confronted with several opinions on the way. After some time you will find some blogs where you trust the author, but this needs to be established. The choice depends on the total transaction costs of both models.
Information overload is another matter in that simon says: In a world where attention is a major scarce resource, information my be an expensive luxury, […].
Sensemaking
This one is about gathering and interpreting a wealth of information. You gather, analyse, synthesise, share and re-use. The entirety of these steps is your cost of knowledge. It allows you to find bottlenecks in your strategy.
To analyse knowledge inside a corporation, look at levels of tasks and then analyse these in terms of gather, …, re-use. Talk to people directly performing those tasks and remember that the politics of knowledge mean that things are never moving only towards efficiency.
Sensemaking also happens beyond the information processing model.
Karl Weick looked at organizational sensemaking, where the individual and the group or indivisible as things become real through interpretation. This model has a three step process: Enactment, Selection, Retention. Enactment here means the construction, re-ordering and re-arranging based on mental models of the group and the individual. There are two main drivers in this model: belief driven and action driven. There are also several levels.
Individual
Intersubjective (I -> We)
Genericsubjective (Group)
Extrasubjective (Culture)
Brenda Darvin talks about everyday sensemaking. We try to achieve shifting goals, hindered by obstacles at which point we move into sensemaking actions in relation to that obstacle. In a group this sensemaking is overlapping and conflicting. It really is in relation to our mental models not fitting together perfectly.