Tim Wood Powell: Profiles in Knowledge

Originally published May 7, 2025

16 min readMay 7, 2025

This is the 115th article in the Profiles in Knowledge series featuring thought leaders in knowledge management. Tim Wood Powell is a thought leader and organizational catalyst in the economics and strategy of knowledge and intelligence. The President of The Knowledge Agency®, he is an epistemic resources strategist. Tim earned degrees in knowledge (lab sciences, philosophy and psychology) and management (analytics, finance) from Yale. He spent ten years at KPMG and PwC in data analytics and business design and development, then several years helping to establish the emerging field of corporate strategic intelligence. Tim’s current work includes knowledge sustainability, knowledge quality assurance, and the value of knowledge.

Tim and I were both adjunct instructors for Columbia University’s Information and Knowledge Strategy graduate program. We are authors in De Gruyter’s Knowledge Services book series. He has been a faithful participant in the monthly calls of the SIKM Leaders Community. And I am impressed that in addition to being a knowledge management consultant, Tim is also a musician.

Background

Education

Yale School of Management — MBA, Concentrations in Data Analysis, Operations Research, and Finance
Yale University — BA, Psychology and Philosophy; Pre-medical Laboratory Sciences

Experience

The Knowledge Agency — President, 1996 — Present
The Conference Board — Senior Fellow, 2019 — Present
Columbia University School of Professional Studies — Adjunct Faculty, 2014–2017
Long Island University Palmer School of Library and Information Science — Adjunct Faculty, 2004–2005
Find/SVP, Managing Director, Strategic Research, 1989–1996
PwC

Manager, Marketing Technologies. 1987–1989
Manager, Business Development, 1985–1987
Manager, New Service Development, 1983–1985

KPMG — Senior Consultant, 1979–1983

Profiles

Content

The Knowledge Agency
LinkedIn Posts
Competing in the Knowledge Economy (archive of old blog)
Blog

Academia.edu

Knowledge by Numbers

Seven Steps to Improving Knowledge ROI

Understand the enterprise value system. What does your client organization measure and reward? Each organization has its own purpose and mission, enterprise metrics, KPIs, and so on. Start by understanding how the organization thinks and communicates about value, both internally and externally. Note that aspects of this will be verticalized, i.e., specific to the client’s industry.
Link knowledge metrics directly to these existing enterprise metrics. This linkage is the primary source of strength and ROI for a knowledge initiative. Knowledge goals and metrics become less relevant the farther they are from organizational goals and metrics.
Identify behaviors you are trying to produce, optimize, or change. Metrics work — because they drive behavior within the organization. Which behaviors are working in achieving desired enterprise outcomes, and which need to improve?
Measure what matters. Develop metrics for those behaviors in a way that is most effective for the benefits (i.e., Results, Outcomes, and Impact) you are trying to achieve. This requires a deep understanding of cause and effect.
Bend the value curve. Engage available value levers to drive benefits up, and costs down. This point gets a little involved, I’ll explain this in a separate post.
Monitor and anticipate. With each metric comes the risk that people will “work to the metric” — and not to what really produces value. Once operational, metrics should be assessed periodically to insure they are producing the desired outcome
Add value continually. Adding value is not a one-time event — it’s an ongoing process driven by a deep underlying commitment to thought leadership.

What is Knowledge Strategy?

Knowledge Strategy is the practice of developing and deploying enterprise knowledge and its component assets as essential and integral resources in competitive business strategy. KS means, simply, actively recognizing and using knowledge as a strategic resource and a direct bridge to competitive advantage.

In other words, knowledge strategy should not be developed separately from a competitive business strategy. The two should be developed and implemented in close coordination, as shown in the Strategic Knowledge Architecture diagram below — and should both respond to the value model defined by the overall purpose and mission of the enterprise.

Selected Bibliography

“Measuring the Value of Information Investments”. The Journal of the Association for Global Strategic Information (AGSI) 3, no. 2 (1994). AGSI.
“The Information Metabolism”. Competitive Intelligence Review 6, no. 4 (1995): 41–45. John Wiley & Sons.
“Competitive Knowledge Management: You Can’t RE-Engineer What Never was Engineered in the First Place”. Competitive Intelligence Review 8, no. 1 (1997): 40–47. John Wiley & Sons.
“Knowledge: The Engine of Value”. Workshop presented to the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, 1999.
“Disinformation About Knowledge Management”. Tech Knowledge column in Competitive Intelligence Magazine 3 (1). Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals, 2000.
“The Knowledge Value Chain: How to Fix It When It Breaks”. Proceedings of the 22nd National Online Meeting, Information Today, 2001b.
“From Knowledge to Value: A Roadmap” Keynote address to Management Consultants Association Summit. Istanbul, Turkey, 2015a.
“Champagne or Grapes? The Commoditization of Knowledge Services and What To Do Now About It”. Presentation to Special Libraries Association New York 2017 Conference and Expo, 2017b.
“Brand Equity Risk: Challenges in the Digital Marketing Era”. The Conference Board, 2019.

Quotes on Knowledge

Knowledge is the master resource that controls the others: land, labor, and capital. But because knowledge is intangible — therefore not formally recognized by today’s accounting principles and practices — it’s often poorly-tended, under-resourced, or even entirely neglected.
Knowledge is an enterprise resource — and should be held to the same ROI standards that any others are. Knowledge should be managed as an investment — not as an expense.
Knowledge is highly leverageable; even modest improvements in how it’s managed can yield disproportionately large outcomes. Any organization — large or small, public, private, or non-profit, in any industry — will benefit.

The Value of Knowledge

Book

Presentation

Articles by Others

The Value of Knowledge by Guy St. Clair
The Knowledge Community: Method or Myth? by Guy St. Clair
A Provocative Question by Guy St. Clair

Defining The Knowledge Strategist by Guy St. Clair

Getting to that KD/KS excellence is a goal Tim Powell recognizes. As someone who works with companies as they pursue knowledge value, Powell has frequent opportunities to observe what works and what doesn’t, and his focus on the Knowledge Value Chain® helps knowledge strategists relate to how companies work with knowledge value.

Powell’s basic focus, re-iterated recently, sets up an almost-perfect scenario for describing how the knowledge strategist can perform, when knowledge value comes into the picture:

‘Value creation’ is the fundamental keystone of our competitive economy — and one of the genuine Mysteries of the Universe. For me one of the best things about business school was the opportunity to think and talk about value for two intense years — both in an abstract theoretical sense, and in very applied sense as it relates to creating value in live casebook situations.

You learn not to take value for granted, even to have a certain reverence for it — that it’s transient, not to be treated carelessly — it can come and go. Much like other living organisms, products, business models, companies, even whole industries have life cycles — they’re born, they grow, they thrive, they ebb, they die.

Knowledge Services: A Strategic Framework for the 21st Century Organization by Guy St. Clair

Epilogue — Knowledge Services. The Critical Management Discipline for the Twenty-First Century Organization

Tim Powell, President and CEO of The Knowledge Agency®, created the concept of the knowledge value chain and is recognized for his success with KVC as he applies it for clients and students (he, too, is a Faculty Facilitator at Columbia University in the City of New York). Tim joins with me in acknowledging the value of our historical precedents in information, knowledge, and strategic learning studies:

Classical economists defined the three essential productive resources of an economy as: LAND (natural resources), LABOR (human resources), and CAPITAL (financial resources.) Today we recognize a fourth productive resource, KNOWLEDGE (“epistemic” resources, also including data, information, and intelligence).
Each of these sets of resources has benefitted from intensive development and pre-eminence during a specific time frame. During the nineteenth century, we achieved mastery of natural resources (mining, manufacturing, materials, etc.). During the early twentieth century, we began to understand human resources (thanks to the work of Frederick Taylor, Henry Ford, and others). In the latter part of the twentieth century, financial principles and technologies became more widely understood and practiced.
During the twenty-first century we must (and we will) achieve greater understanding and mastery of epistemic resources — a science of knowledge, accompanied by rapid development of knowledge practices and technologies to help our enterprises perform effectively in the “knowledge economy.”
The pioneering work of knowledge strategists and knowledge thought leaders — and those they learn from — has paved the way for these developments. To those starting on your journey of exploration and discovery in the “knowledge domain,” behold and benefit from those who came before you. They did not produce all the answers — in that, they have left plenty for you to accomplish. But they did — spurred on by the needs of their clients, their colleagues, and their consciences — begin to ask the questions: how can knowledge do more for people, for organizations, for civil society — indeed, for the world? Knowledge services and knowledge strategy are leading the way. Listen to those who came before, learn from them, use their insights — and be richly rewarded.

Precious Lore by Darren Baguley

Nevertheless, much of the techniques that apply to any change-management process can be applied to a KM implementation, says Accenture’s talent and organization performance practice senior executives, Tom Hoglund and Tim Powell.

“The issues are around how you change the culture from knowledge being something you covet, to knowledge being something you share,” says Hoglund. “That involves looking at all the standard levers you would use to change behavior. That includes aligning learning and development with the KM systems. It’s also about alignment with the performance-management system.”

Powell adds that leadership behavior is critical as well. “As with any change-management process, the executive team needs to monitor and measure the behaviors and build them into performance evaluations, and so on.

“But leaders need to be cheerleading the activities, talking about where people are using the KM system to win business, getting things done smarter and faster, as well as banging people over the head if they’re not doing the right thing.”

The business case for business Intelligence by Mor Sela (references Intelligence: Building the Business Case)

Position intelligence as an investment. Proving a business case consists of creating a reasonable expectation among investors — in this case, your management team — that value will be created.
Let the numbers do the talking. Value in a business context is best measured economically — with hard numbers. Numbers are the language of modern business, and without them, you might as well be speaking classical Greek.
Work hard on your business case. While assigning hard numbers to intelligence may be challenging, it is by no means impossible. You may have to sharpen your pencil and put your thinking cap on.
Don’t reinvent the wheel. There are existing models “out there” (like the discounted cash flow project financing model we’ve proposed here) that your management will already understand. You can use these to build your case for intelligence.
Focus on the benefits. If you really get stuck on the hard benefits, make sure you do a really thorough job on thinking through the soft ones.
Practice thinking like a businessperson. Intelligence professionals are usually very good at finding information — but not always so good at realizing what it means for the value of the business.
Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Absurdly high claims for value will catch up to you and will tarnish your credibility.

KMWorld 2023 Sees a Sea Change by Michael E.D. Koenig

A topic that appeared in 2022, in a very prescient KMWorld presentation by Tim Powell, was zombie knowledge. Zombie knowledge is material that is dated, or no longer correct or relevant, which clutters up or degrades your KM system. One of the concerns that arose frequently in 2023 was that, with GenAI, the need arises to recognize and correct hallucinatory information — the false and misleading information that it creates and propagates. Such “knowledge” can not only be misleading, but even dangerous. It was seen as obvious that dealing with hallucinations is a nontrivial problem, and that it will require the same techniques that are appropriate for zombie knowledge.

Put another way, GenAI can be expected to enormously expand the domain of and the problem with zombie knowledge. Powell referred to the potential of GenAI to be an industrial-strength disinformation machine, potentially creating reams of zombie data and purported knowledge, which would need to be recognized and dealt with.

Fourth stage of KM revealed at the KMWorld conference by Michael E.D. Koenig

Zombie knowledge

The most intriguing new entrant in this year’s conference was the concept of “zombie knowledge” — how to recognize it and respond to it. Zombie knowledge is what is in your KM system but is no longer useful, pertinent, or even accurate. It is zombie-like because it is built from what was live and valid information, but as information that has not died as it should have, it is now capable of behaving malignantly. And, even if nonmalignant, it is noise and clutter that distracts and impedes the system. Maintaining and providing such information is often counterproductive. How should such information be identified and handled?

Explicit recognition of the zombie notion apparently originated in a conversation in the SIKM Leaders Community last January, catalyzed by a phrase tossed out by Patrick Ready, KMS Lighthouse, and seized upon by Jane Dysart, KMWorld conference chair, and Tim Powell, The Knowledge Agency. The topic was bookended at the KMWorld conference by a workshop led by Powell on Monday and a presentation by Patrick Lambe, Straits Knowledge, on Thursday.

The corollary issues that derive from zombie knowledge are fascinating. How do you monitor the accuracy and pertinence of what is in your KM system? This is certainly an issue, even just for routine information. The zombie knowledge concept, however, is broader. For tactical and strategic information, it becomes far more compelling. Knowledge is certainly not simply facts and data; it is also corporate culture and how-to knowledge. Does this how-to knowledge include corporate strategy? Does this mean that a role for KM is, or should be, to monitor corporate strategy? This is not a role that most KM managers have contemplated or anticipated.

Interestingly and insightfully, the new ISO standard on KM, if not explicitly recognizing this issue, provides a place for it. ISO Standard 9001:2015, clause 7.1.6, breaks the KM process down into four steps. Powell parsed it this way: Determine, Maintain, Provide, Refresh. The choice of the term “refresh” seems clearly to imply more than just adding what is new. It also implies the housekeeping of removing what is old and stale before it becomes a dangerous malignancy.

Conferences and Communities

KMWorld Conference

InfoToday

2003 W17: The Knowledge Value Chain
2001: KnowledgeNets E301: Ten Myths About KM Processes and Implementations

SIKM Leaders Community

Videos

The Purpose of Knowledge

Interviewed by Kendra Albright — Part 1

Interviewed by Kendra Albright — Part 2

Why Knowledge is Often Undervalued

Effective Knowledge Transfer Must Be Personalized

The critical role that knowledge plays

Unlocked: Interviewed by Madelyn Blair

Books

The Value of Knowledge: The Economics of Enterprise Knowledge and Intelligence

Book Structure

Section 1 — Introduction. What is the book’s purpose (i.e., its overall value proposition)? Who are the intended audiences, and how can each put its contents to use? I’ll draw some key taxonomic distinctions and definitions and offer some notes to clarify the scope of what I will cover.
Section 2 — Knowledge as an Enterprise Function. Most of you reading this are working in knowledge services or related fields– or studying and planning to do so. Why do organizations create budgets and jobs for such activities? What purposes does knowledge serve in the modern enterprise?
Section 3 — Knowledge as an Economic Resource. The idea that knowledge is an essential economic resource is a relatively new one. Where did it arise, and why? Is knowledge fully recognized as a resource, or is there still work to be done?
Section 4 — The Knowledge Value Chain®. The KVC framework has evolved into a sort of “skeleton key” that opens the rest of my work. I have lectured on it around the world for over two decades and published one major monograph and many articles and blog posts about it. How does it work? How can it be applied? What value does it add?
Section 5 — Increasing Knowledge ROI. My goal in teaching you about how the value of knowledge works is to enable you to recognize and capital ize on new opportunities to do so. How is knowledge ROI measured? What levers can we push to increase its value? How can we balance economic and societal value?
Section 6 — Knowledge to Value. Some organizations generate so much knowledge that they can productize or even monetize that knowledge. How do you sell knowledge? What are the steps and resources needed to do this? How do you build a business case for knowledge?
Section 7 — Knowledge Strategy. If, by this point in your journey, you have come to believe that knowledge is a key economic resource and is in fact the key resource to compete effectively in the Knowledge Era– as I have– then you will see the connection between knowledge and enterprise strategy. They achieve their maximum impact when they are closely integrated. How is this best accomplished? What are the advantages of doing this?
Appendix — Presented here are two model question sets, one for Producers of knowledge, the other for Users. Also included is an index of more than two dozen strategies for adding value and a list of major findings presented in the text.
Bibliography — Decades ago, I began reading and collecting books and articles on topics related to the value of knowledge. I am glad to pass along these references that will enable deeper dives and further research into many of the areas covered herein

Core Propositions — The Value of Knowledge

Enterprise is fundamentally a human activity — of people, by people, and for people. Organizations are composed of people making individual and group decisions under uncertainty and exhibit the strengths and weaknesses of human cognition and behavior.
Knowledge and information are fundamentally different. All knowledge is tacit, organic, and dynamic. Information is the explicit, inorganic, static manifestation of knowledge.
Knowledge is an economic resource — it has costs and benefits. Knowledge value describes the relationship between knowledge costs and knowledge benefits.
Knowledge generates actualized enterprise value only in being applied. Prior to being used or applied, knowledge has potential value. The actualized value generated by knowledge is inversely proportional to the distance (in time and space) between its production and its use.
The value of knowledge is stakeholder-centric and stakeholder contextual. Different users for a knowledge element may value it in different ways and to different degrees.
Knowledge is not power. Knowledge must work within the power structure, rules, strategies, and metrics of the enterprise.
Knowledge value development is a process that occurs in time and that consumes resources. It has a series of gated steps and a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Knowledge strategies scale. Value principles that apply at a macro level (e.g., the enterprise) may be applied at a micro level (e.g., the work product), and vice versa.
Knowledge represents the majority of enterprise value in many industries — yet it rarely shows up in formal financial statements.
Value is dynamic and is affected by a number of ever-changing factors. Value propositions must be continually calibrated, refined, and aligned.