Just in Time Knowledge Acquisition

The Internet has brought about many changes in business. For example, it has made "just in time" inventory processes common. If you think about it, the intermediate goods that are used by manufactures embody knowledge, from the primary industries that extract the raw materials with which they are made, and the processing industries which produce the industrial matereials, to the parts manufacturers that use the materials to make parts, not neglecting the knowledge of the intermediaries in those processes. With the Internet, the parts and the knowledge they embody need not be stored for long periods on the basis that they might be needed, but can be obtaining just in time for their use.

Think about outsourcing of business functions. The Internet allows the firm to obtain the needed services just in time for them to be used, without the need to keep people in the firm with the knowledge to produce the services; the firms providing Internet mediated services can utilize their staffs more efficiently because they face a greater demand for the services than would be present within a single firm. Of course, outsourcing to India means that one can find the needed knowledge embodied in people who work cheaper than those with comparable skills in the United States. The Internet makes those low cost skills available just in time and "just in place".

Firms have been slimming down, focusing on their core competencies and outsourcing that which they used to do internally. Again, one can think of the process as maximizing concentration on their core knowledge and skills, and obtaining other needed inputs from other firms "just in time" where those other firms in turn have concentrated on their own specialized knowldedge and skills.

The most obvious and perhaps most important knowledge possessed by a firm is that which is embodied in its people. Clearly it is expensive to staff an organization with people who each possess lots of skills and knowledge. It is usually inefficient in that at any time the individual is unlikely to bring much of that knowledge to bear on the task at hand.

Knowledge depreciates! Technologies change, and the knowledge which once respresented a mastery of a technology will no longer do so at some future date; as technology change accelerates, technological knowledge depreciates more rapidly. Similarly conditions change. The detailed knowledge of markets in the 1990s is not much use in the next decade. The management approaches that may have functioned well for the factory workers of the past may not function equally well for the knowledge workers of the future.

So, can we use the Internet to provide just in time knowledge to the people who work in our organizations? Can they quickly pick up the knowledge that they are about to apply. We know that learning can be improved if it occurs in close conjunction to its application.

I think the military has been working on this problem for a long time, and I think it has been having some success. Still, just in time provision of needed knowledge is going to require major institutional changes. A lot of people still conceptualize a society in which people go to school for a couple of decades and then work for five more without added schooling. That is a system with a huge investment up front, which produces a large stock of knowledge, under the assumptions that it will deteriorate slowly and that much of it will be used regularly. I suspect neither of those assumptions continues to hold.

So we now see a change to lifelong learning, to short courses, to elearning, to instruction provided by commerical firms rather than the public sector, etc. Still there is a long way to go!