I'll have a pepperoni, with extra predictive analytics...

One of the great things about vacation is that it allows me to dicsonnect - or at least unwire - from technology. I find a great many things, though, that speak to technology issues, no matter where I am, or what I am doing.

I offer as an example of this the humble pizza, and its carry-out cousin, the Chinese dinner. When you have had a hard day of driving and fun, sometimes there is not enough energy left in your body to handle eating out. On such occasions, there are about two types of food that will deliver - pizza and Chinese. The two couldn't be more different, though, and I'm not just talking about the types of food.

When we ordered pizza one night, it came with one accessory - a box. It was exactly what we ordered, and nothing more. When we ordered Chinese, it came with napkins, extra sauces, plates, forks, and another menu.

Consider that for a second - which of the two places was more likely to make a future sale to us, the one that provided just what we asked for, or the one that provided what we asked for, plus some of what we needed, in a way that it allowed us to better consume what we purchased?

For the pizza, we had to tear up the boxes to create plates, and that meant that we had nothing to use to contain the crusts and leftover pizza, which I'm sure was a bad thing for the maid. We tried to be neat, but there was too much for the small trash cans in the room.

When we ate the Chinese food, we laced it on plates, ate with silverware like civilized people, and, when we were done, the box it came in was perfect to do the waste disposal in.

You may question what this has to do with knowledge management, but the concept of a simple take-out order has quite a lot of parallels to efficient use of information. Suppose that every time we asked for data it was useful to us - really useful - how much value would that add? A lot! True knowledge management is packaging core information within environmental, contextual, functional and perpetual data so that its value is enhanced.

I'm currently in New Orleans, a city that has seen what the effects are of accurate, but situationally-isolated data. I'm struck by how many potential disaster situations have either happened, or might happen. Would the mortgage crisis have been averted by the surrounding data showing tax rates, raw materials costs, insurance rates, debt-to-income rations and other, affiliated information, rather than just what each individual's assessed home value was so that 125% of that value could be loaned out? I'd say possibly, especially with the knowledge that taxes are based on assessed value, and so when the need arises to raise funds, there is no 'easier' way for that to happen than for the taxing municipalities to re-assess with an eye toward 'maximizing value' and other factors.

Responsible KM is more than delivery, it is also forecasting, defining and cataloging. We as practitioners must be careful to provide it properly, and thoroughly.