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Today’s successful organizations (like Amazon and Google) understand the power of developing knowledge services to achieve organizational goals. This concept applies to all organizations, including and probably most important, for the government. Government assets are public assets, and public servants are responsible for managing those assets for the greatest benefit to constituents. When resources go untapped, they provide no value to our constituency. Knowledge-asset management programs help tap our knowledge resources.

Knowledge resources—data, information, and knowledge—are no different from oil and gas assets, in that they must be valued, mined, refined, and distributed into the marketplace to provide value. Unlike many tangible assets, however, knowledge assets are renewable through knowledge-management business practices. “Knowledge management (KM) is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers.” ¹⁾

Knowledge management is something that we do every day in our jobs, but we often do it in very unofficial and siloed ways that do not promote improved service delivery. Imagine for a moment that knowledge assets are water, and each government office building had no infrastructure for water to flow through the building. In addition, agencies develop plans to bring water into their buildings for various uses independently, without unified standards, and are budgeted money individually to support this. This is the current state of our public enterprise architecture (EA).