Making sense of it all: implementing an emerging KM technology within the organisation

Organisations have access to unreadable volumes of textual data and yet individuals are required to make sense of emerging practices and events from this blizzard of information. Tools that provide an overview of unstructured information to aid higher level understanding are now easily available. These category mapping tools have not been widely used. This paper describes the implementation and use of one such tool within a large commercial research organisation. We highlight two aspects of sense-making that come into play. First, the organisation struggles to make sense of what it does and what it does not know in the context of a surfeit of information. Second, in order to exploit appropriate tools in this process, the organisation must also make sense of the value and use of these tools.