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34 Chapter 2

summarizes or repackages information to meet the needs of distinct individuals
through profi ling and personalization value-added activities.
Meyer and Zack echoed other authors in stressing “ the importance of managing
the evolution and renewal of product architecture for sustained competitive success
. . . different architectures result in different product functionality, cost, quality and
performance. Architectures are . . . a basis for product innovation ” (Meyer and Zack
1996, 44). Research and knowledge about the design of physical information products
can inform the design of a KM cycle. In Meyer and Zack ’ s approach, the interfaces
between each of the stages are designed to be seamless and standardized. Experience
suggests the critical importance of specifying internal and external user interfaces in
order to do so.
The Meyer and Zack KM cycle processes are composed of the technologies, facilities,
and processes for manufacturing products and services. He suggests that information
products are best viewed as a repository comprising information content and structure.
Information content is the data held in the repository that provides the building
blocks for the resulting information products. The content is unique for each type of
business or organization. For example, banks have content relating to personal and
commercial accounts, insurance companies hold information on policies and claims,
and pharmaceutical companies have a large body of scientifi c and marketing knowl-
edge around each product under design or currently sold.
In addition to the actual content, the other important elements to consider are the
overall structure and approach as to how the content is stored, manipulated, and
retrieved. The information unit is singled out as the formally defi ned atom of informa-
tion to be stored, retrieved, and manipulated. This notion of a unit of information is
a critical concept that should be applied to knowledge items as well. A focus at the
level of a knowledge object distinguishes KM from document management. While a
document management system (DMS) stores, manipulates, and retrieves documents
as integral wholes, KM can easily identify, extract, and manage a number of different
knowledge items (sometimes referred to as “ knowledge objects ” ) within the same
document. The unit under study is thus quite different — both in nature and scale. This
again links us back to the notion that KM is not about the exhaustive collection of
voluminous content but rather more selective sifting and modifi cation of existing
captured content. The term often used today is “ content management systems. ”
Different businesses once again make use of unique meaningful information units.
For example, a repository of fi nancial statements is held in Mead ’ s Data System Lexis/
Nexis and the footnotes can be defi ned as information units. A user is able to select
a particular fi nancial statement for analysis based on key attributes of the footnotes.