Information Pyramids: Actionable Information

Information Pyramids are a concept that Ron Weisenburger invented in 2002 when he was working with forage and beef cattle researchers in Agriculture Canada and the western provinces in Canada.

This article explains information architecture design for websites that need to guide customers to best information, current best practice and detailed information in a way that does not result in information glut and over-reliance on search. Foragebeef.ca and landuseKN.ca are two websites that are structured on Information pyramids.  

Ron's challenge was that some of the researchers were about to retire. Concerned about keeping really good information visible for ranchers and cow-calf producers in the Canadian western prairies, the researchers wanted a website that summarized the best information they had on different issues on growing grass and hay and raising beef cows and calves.

As the Chief Knowledge Officer for Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development, Ron Weisenburger's invention was to propose an information architecture that featured three layers of information on the website.

Layer 1, the top of the information pyramid, is the knowledge nugget or knowledge summary. It is a checklist of issues are immediately relevant to current circumstances. They are the issues a well-informed customer should be paying attention to.  The knowledge summary is actionable information because the community of experts who produce them summarize in a sentence these key actions as:

• What You Should Do
• What You Should Avoid
• What is Coming Over the Horizon

I contend that your value to your organization and your clients is realized when  you regularly produce knowledge summaries that clearly cover these three topics. If you don't, why are you an expert and why would anybody care what you do?

The knowledge summary is a checklist of actionable information

Knowledge summaries are at the core of good advice. And like good advice, they have a "Best Before" date stamp on them. Circumstances change and so should the knowledge summary. You usually don't see knowledge summaries written down (I will say more than I can write down). That makes them even more valuable when they are and when they are regularly updated to stay current with changing circumstances.

Ron Weisenburger's vision was that in the knowledge summary, you could click on a topic you should be paying attention to and get directed to Layer 2, the factsheet that describes "How To" do the current good practice you need to learn more about (or refresh your memory on).

 The factsheet on "How To"

The 3 to 5 page factsheet, that in layman's language explains and illustrates (pictures and graphics are important) what to do step by step, takes a community of experts to develop. It becomes a best practice guide. The most efficient way to develop checklists and factsheets is have someone write the strawdog (it will be about 80% right) and then have the community edit the draft. You will see communities of practitioners (CoPs) do this in wikis. The key is to tailor the factsheet to the level and tools that the target audience uses. With the emergence of mobile devices, shrinking good practice guides down to photos, illustrations and short text makes for in-field guides that reside on the hip and are more accessible than printed guides. Good practices guides are more static than checklists. They tend to have a lifetime of 3 to 5 years before changes in technology or research require updating.



The Details, Layer 3, presents the research articles, manuals, reports and regulatory instructions that are judged most useful by the community of experts. Information pyramids do not cover all the information on a topic, just the most relevant, robustly useful and foundational to the topic. Links from the How To factsheet bring the customer to this level if they need the detailed step by step instruction, the background research that supports the practice or the regulatory details that shape the current good practice.

The Details are the manual, research article, research report or regulatory instructions, standards and codes of practice.

Ron Weisenberger's information pyramid was a revolutionary concept in delivering really good information in a small footprint. The links allow a user to journey down to the material he/she is unfamiliar with. It also provides the opportunity to remind users to pay attention to fundamentals or key learnings they may have forgotten.

A second advantage of information pyramids is that they don't have to deliver all the information on the website. Really good detailed information can reside on other websites (e.g. factsheets or the details (reports, manuals, regulations)) and the information pyramid just links to to that information.

Today, an expert's tweet can be the one sentence line that highlights a currently relevant checklist topic. The blog can be the short introduction to the How To factsheet. And the Details can reside wherever the community of practitioners find access the easiest. Information pyramids are a different twist on the concept of news agregators. The toughest task is getting a community of practitioners to regularly review and update the checklist of currently relevant "Things to Do" today and "Things to Watch Out For".

The concept of information pyramids is introduced at foragebeef.ca
in their section "About Foragebeef.ca". Information pyramids also are a key structural element in the Alberta Land-use Knowledge Network's landuseKN.ca website. The article, "Information Pyramids, Presenting Really Good Information to You" on landuseKN.ca is more detailed on how to construct information pyramids.

At the core of this is a community of practitioners who take on the task of constructing the information pyramid and then weeding and maintaining it. Without their attention, the checklists quickly become out of date. Knowledge requires the active participation of knowledgeable practitioners.

Information Management Taxonomy, a teaser

Here is a snapshot of Alberta Agriculture's draft of what taxonomy would look like for the corporate support processes in information management. This is only a partial picture of this category.

But in terms of the structure of a functional taxonomy, "Information Management" would be considered a FUNCTION. "Information Access Management" would be considered a Sub-Function and "Information Request" would be considered an activity.

So in the Government of Alberta model there are three levels. Nominally there is a fourth level, tasks. But for the most part information will be classified with enough granularity with three levels.

The (Hopeful) State of Information Management

To Hope: Look with expectation and desire (Concise Oxford Dictionary).

Information management (IM) is at a hopeful state. And just in time. Finally, enterprise document management systems are getting sophisticated enough to support the emergent systems of information classification and information metadata. With that hopeful, emergent development, information management will bring enough structure to unstructured information so that it can be managed.

Information management is a fundamental support to knowledge management. Most organizations find that organized enterprise information is as essential as a library is to a university. In the early days of knowledge management, there was a rush by software companies to proclaim that their e-filing systems could be leveraged into knowledge libraries. Unfortunately, in the early days, most of the software companies and many early knowledge management gurus journeyed into the information jungle without ..... librarians.

Librarians and libraries get no respect. Witness the page ripping from priceless historical documents and the upending of book racks in the movie "Angels and Demons". Bad, bad Robert Langdon. But with names like the Dewey Decimal Classification system, it's no surprise that eyes glaze over when information classification is discussed.

Nor do records managers get respect. There was a time when nobody touched the business and working files of an organization except administrative assistants who were trained in the arcane rules of records management. Staff or managers who had the audacity file their own files were taught through the dreaded "the file the manager put away and never could be found again" experience. But when personal computers arrived on staffs' desktops, administrative assistants were downsized and information chaos arrived unfettered. Every new information sharing technology (e-mail, instant messaging, websites, blogs and wikis) came without information organizing rules and tools .

To cope, businesses created information duplication, which became mislabeled "information overload". Information storage was cheap. Search engines promised easy retrieval.

Librarians and records managers became Cassandras, warning of apocalyptic melt-down. Pick your poison: system crash, e-Discovery, information security breaches. Only on business critical information (websites, legal documents, executive correspondence and advice to executives) did the organization make any effort to manage the information. But that happened behind the scenes and usually with the bare minimum of staff training.

So, of course, knowledge libraries failed.

And of course, the real message of early knowledge management got lost. There is critical information, how to do work and business intelligence, that all in the organization needs to be able post, find and discuss. Today, we expect to find this information on the business' intranet portal.

The hopeful state is the emergence of generic and now practical metadata standards. Metadata is data about data. Much of this experience is coming from the web content management systems. Metadata is necessary in web content management because content owners (authors) need to be reminded when their articles becomes stale and need revision or removal. Metadata is needed for the publishing process (and it can help in findability, mashups and value adding information).

Information classification systems for corporate business processes are now reaching the generic state. My last project before leaving the Government of Alberta was to look at an information classification system for corporate processes. The revelation, slowly being digested particularly by the records management community, is that if you want staff to take ownership of their information, you have to approach it from their perspective of corporate and business processes.

In "functional classification" taxonomy, the word "function" is (nearly) a synonym for "business process". With that revelation, the reasons for a enterprise content management system start to make sense. There are business processes. Map the business process; define where information comes into and out of the business process; build the information classification system and the enterprise content management software to support the business process. So focusing on corporate support services processes (human resources, finance, IT, IM and yes, knowledge management) has led the Government of Alberta to a generic information classification system. It's about 80% of the way there.

In the words of Gerard Vaillancourt, Acting Director for Information Management, Alberta Agriculture, "This is found knowledge. We can take this as tablets of stone and not reinvent the wheel". So the hard work of Teresa Richey, Director of Information Management, Alberta Employment and Immigration, the training and promotional skills of Karina Guy, g2 Management Consulting and the Service Alberta IM crew have gotten information management to the hopeful state.

Of course, you could take this as a promotion for the ARMA National conference next week (May 31 to June 3) in Edmonton. You will find some of the historical issues of information management on the agenda but you also find a hands-on session process mapping. See the detailed program.

Finally after a decade, the promise that led Tom Davenport to collaborate with Larry Prusak on "Working Knowledge" is within sight. Davenport's field is business process management. The alignment of information management software and information architecture to support business processes is getting near. It will finally make knowledge libraries and the corporate intranet provide the support for business intelligence and how to do work that Davenport anticipated.

Common Myths About Knowledge That Hold Us Back

At the end of our Edmonton Km Network meeting last week, Stu Muir, Tri-Global Solutions, asked a really good question. "What are the common myths (about knowledge management) that are holding us back?"

Some in the earlier posts in this blog address some of the misconceptions that get in the way of encouraging and coaching really good information and know-how sharing. But the diagram above offers up a simplistic and ultimately dangerous model, The Knowledge Hierarchy.

David Snowden challenges this model in his blog "Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement". And bless his soul, I have seen where Larry Prusack referenced this hierachy.

Every time I have a conversation about knowledge management, this model usually shows up. I have heard Deputy Ministers and CEOs reference it. It is popular because it is simple and it is dangerous because it is too simplistic. When Peter Drucker introduced the concept of a "knowledge worker", he wasn't thinking that the organization also would move up this hierarchy to become a "Wise Organization".

Data is translated into information. Information moves up to knowledge. Knowledge coupled with experience becomes wisdom.

To see the fallacy of the model, add "management" to the end of each of these words and then ask the question: "Can you actually manage it?"

Data management, yes and for most organizations, absolutely essential. Information management, certainly some information and not easy. Knowledge management, critical knowledge and hard to do. Wisdom Management, who wants the title "Director of Wisdom Management"??

Let's cut to the chase. All your customers and clients are interested in is really good information (that they can use for making a decision). They don't care about your know-how or what you know about. Really the only person who does is your supervisor. But your customers and clients rate your expertise on whether you provide really good information.

Really good information requires the sieve of the expert's know-how. Understand this and then you will start to see where you can help staff and the organization generate and share important information.

Please leave The Knowledge Hierarchy outside the door when you talk to your Executive about knowledge management to improve critical information sharing. While this hierarchy may seem to be helpful in arguing for a knowledge management strategy, remember this. All they are truly interested in is how your initiative will help the organization generate and then share critical, strategic information.

If we must discuss knowledge, recall what we know and don't know. "We don't know what we need to know until we need to know it." That is the challenge for individuals and organizations and no amount of data to information to knowledge to wisdom is going to solve that.