Hindsight is always 20/20. In retrospect 9/11 and Pearl Harbor both look obvious when you look at the individual pieces of information. But it is hard to find these landmarks in the see of information.

Certainly, every organization needs to be better at sharing information to capture opportunities and avoid unknown risks. That has always been one of the goals of knowledge management. We also need to learn from our mistakes.

Sorry, but I can't agree with your assessment that this is a classic case of inadequate knowledge management. If it turns out that the memo was *not* transferred in spite of a process to do so on personel transfers (typically not by the Walter Reed officials quoted; what really was done by the human resources staff?), *then* you would have a knowledge management problem.
There is no way of coding the memo to make it important enough to distinguish this one piece of information out of the many others in someone's personnel file. And, whatever coding was assigned could be wrong, leaving the subject black-balled for life. We need to be careful in contemplating knowledge management systems, as our collection of information is always imperfect. All coding schemes hide ambiguities, and this is all too readily ascribed to flawed systems and inadequate processes.
Knowledge management is not decision making, and vice versa.

Doug -

Having the information available to the decision maker is one thing. Having
a decision maker capable of understanding that information and taking
appropriate action is another thing altogether. All that knowledge
management can to is improve the information flows, organize it in such a
way as to facilitate retrieval, and augment training through lessons
learned. The nature and consequences of the decisions are the
responsibility of those decision makers.

- Mary

Tony –

You're right that knowledge management is not decision making. However, KM has an important role to play in supporting decision making. Many knowledge managers believe that one of their functions to help decision makers obtain the information they need to take action. If the official investigations reveal that the decision makers at Fort Hood made decisions without the benefit of important information, this should lead to questions about their decision making process and about the KM systems that were in place to support them. We used to think about coding content to facilitate information retrieval. But with the advent of better technology, more organizations are turning to increasingly effective enterprise search engines, in some cases augmented by automated data extraction or document profiling tools. While these systems are far from perfect, they are able to handle more information than manual coders and thus tend to allow more information to surface.

As to whether or not the critical memo was “transferred” from Walter Reed to Fort Hood, the news reports today indicated that it was. But perhaps we should wait until the inevitable official investigations have taken place before we speak categorically about this.

- Mary

Nice post, Mary. I agree picking up weak signals and making sense of them is an important task of KM(ers). That's why I read an article in MIT Sloan about “picking up weak signals” with interest. I blogged about it here.

Thanks so much, Samuel. There's a real art to picking up weak signals and interpreting them correctly. In fact, I'm not sure many of us know when background “noise” actually contains important information. Your post provides a good starting point for a person or organization that wants to improve its sense making of weak signals.

- Mary

Thanks so much, Samuel. There's a real art to picking up weak signals and interpreting them correctly. In fact, I'm not sure many of us know when background “noise” actually contains important information. Your post provides a good starting point for a person or organization that wants to improve its sense making of weak signals.

- Mary