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Oil field workers all over the world share information and insight in one place.
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Transform Raw Data Into Knowledge

HATTIE (In the Stuido) : Hi. I'm Hattie Bryant. One of the great mysteries of life is the human mind. What can we know? And, when do we really know it?

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Small Business School
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1. Transform Raw Data Into Knowledge
2. Keep Improving
3. Admit Mistakes
4. Give Up Free Wheeling
5. Give Employees Unlimited Connections
6. Partner With Other Big Brains
7. Charge For Insight
8. Automate The Mundane
9. Adopt The musketeer Mentality
10. Hire The Off Beat
11. Think Tomorrow Sell Today
12. Go After The Chinese Market
13.   Force Marketing And IT
To Work Together
14. Win Coveted Awards


Today, we visit with people who are providing answers that will change our perception of information, knowledge, insight and, yes, even wisdom.

First, we go to Westerham, England, where a very small business is saving very large businesses millions of dollars because they have keys to vaults of information that, when processed through their hands, becomes knowledge and leads the person with questions to exacting new insights.

Voiceover) In Westerham, England, about 20 miles southeast of London, we found the simple offices of an international award-winning software company, Transition Associates. Founded by Miles Corbett and David Bowden, the company makes knowledge out of raw data. They serve some of the biggest companies in the world with a team of 16 who work from offices scattered around the country.

DAVID BOWDEN: Knowledge management is a very broad subject to me. It covers a vast number of things.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) One of Transition Associates' largest customers is Baker Hughes. All over the world, its engineers drill into the plate tectonics of the Earth. The insight and wisdom gained at every location now becomes part of an organic knowledge database built by Transition Associates.

MILES CORBETT: (Voiceover) This was a really interesting process. David and I knew a lot about their business. We knew a lot about helping people to drill oil wells and what went into that.

But they had a new vision. They realized that they knew more about drilling for oil and gas than companies like Amoco, Exxon, BP, Shell, but they didn't know how they could convince them to do so. And they were just in the middle of spending $7 million on an expert system to select drill bits. And they wanted to work out how could they improve that process because it wasn't going too well at that stage.

So two of them wrote a book, 350 pages of close typed A4 text, one illustration, 350 pages. And this was a book on how to drill the best oil wells.

DAVID: If you've read it, if you could stick through and read it and actually absorb it, it's brilliant stuff and the beginning of something very good. But it was unusable.

MILES: We took that and translated that into some tools which fragment it down into digestible sizes of objects.

DAVID: A lot of what we do is taking people's messages and communicating them and helping to apply them with effect within an organization. And that's a knowledge management story. That's a cost delivery story. To some degree, that's an application development story as well.

MILES: We took their experience, right? We translated it into retained knowledge and then we built a tool which distributed the ideas.

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