Welcome message

Information and knowledge have become key factors in our daily work. They are main ingredients of what we do and how we do things. While performing our daily activities we develop new knowledge through experience and insight. We engage in information and knowledge exchange with others: implicitly through conversations and dialogues, more explicitly through e-mail, letters and publications or in hybrid forms, like seminars and training events.

Drowning in information, thirsty for knowledge

Yet, despite of – or maybe due to the abundance of – all these activities, we struggle with the management of it. In particular, the extraction of meaningful and relevant knowledge from the wealth of information seems to be a main challenge. We are drowning in information, but we remain thirsty for knowledge.

Knowledge to do what

When people propose a new knowledge management solution, the key question I always ask is: ‘Knowledge to do what?’. Knowledge does not come cheap, and managing knowledge often takes significant resources. There are one-off investments for systems and structures and they can be a first barrier for implementation. But the biggest investment is time. Time from people to create, capture, systematise, organise, distribute, apply, learn from and maintain knowledge. Time that cannot be spend on something else. When people have to make choices on how to spend their time, they will spend it on what they believe will yield the highest return, or what is the most critical. Knowledge is not the goal of knowledge management. It is what knowledge enables you or the organisation to do with it. Knowledge will make you act.

Earlier on, you have enlisted for our E-conference “Knowledge Management: Worth the effort?!” I want to thank you for this first step and on behalf of IRC I welcome you to this conference.

Connect and learn from each other

The ‘Knowledge to do what?’ is to connect you all together and to learn from each other what works and what does not work when it comes to knowledge management in our sector. A key challenge for us all will be to keep it practical and to stay away from too much theoretical contemplation. Consider the conference as a marketplace, where you may gain most by bringing something to the table, a question or an answer, a thought or a solution. I call upon all of you to make the next step and to invest some of your precious time and creativity over the next four weeks to contribute what you know or what you would like to learn. As a result, I hope that you will act more confidently on KM after this E-conference. I wish you a successful and enjoyable conference.

Viktor A.R. Markowski MBA
Head - Information and Communication
IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre
P.O. Box 2869, 2601 CW Delft, The Netherlands