Too Much Information, Not Enough Knowledge
On Sept. 11, information was everywhere. Many of those who died in the towers watched what was happening on their televisions, phoned loved ones and sent out messages via BlackBerry, connected almost to the end.

It was cellphone calls from flight attendants that made the airlines aware that at least two planes had been hijacked. Television was explaining that an airplane had hit the north tower while people inside were wondering what the noise was. A woman told her husband on the Pennsylvania plane about the crashes of other hijacked airplanes, and he and fellow passengers apparently rushed the cockpit.

But in the upper reaches of the World Trade Center's south tower, where some 300 people survived the initial impact, there was an open staircase used by at least 18 to flee while at least 200 others, unaware of the exit, made their way to a locked rooftop door. Meanwhile, the Emergency Broadcast System lay dormant.

In such an emergency, "the fog of reality is still almost as bad as the fog of war," said John Seely Brown, the former director of the research mecca Xerox PARC.

The point applies to far more than the World Trade Center. From intelligence agencies to business leaders to copier repairmen, the critical issue is no longer getting information, but getting the right information to the right people at the right time. And that turns out to be one of the hardest tasks around.

So says the field of "knowledge management." One of the Next Big Things of the 1990's business boom, it promised to turn raw information into the far more valuable commodity of knowledge. Its experts love to quote a former head of Hewlett Packard, who once said: "If only H.P. knew what H.P. knows, think of how much more successful we would be."

The field's novelty and some of its cachet has worn off in the business world, but there are still serious thinkers methodically seeking ways to cultivate communities of expertise within organizations and to connect the people who know things with the people who need to know such things. Some are using the World Trade Center disaster and its aftermath to look for new ways to apply knowledge management.

Congress's examination of intelligence failures prior to the Sept. 11 is already yielding snapshots of vast collections of unanalyzed information. "We didn't know what we knew," as one former F.B.I. official put it, in a painful echo of that Hewlett Packard chief.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/09/weekinreview/09JOHN.html