Comments on: Knowledge Management is Marching Along

By: Lisa McIntyre

Lisa McIntyre — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:25:42 +0000

I think a name change would be good if it incorporated the perceived issues with KM (you mean I need to do something to make it work?!!??). Still paramount to the success of KM is the need for human interaction (as has been noted already). Companies are still looking for that magic bullet that takes the responsibility out of the users hands and allows technology do the work. Because KM 1.0 showed that users either don’t care, didn’t see the benefit, or just didn’t want to take responsibility for KM. Well, we’re getting there (technology taking over) , but not quite. So maybe we could go with something like “I need to share my Knowledge” Management.

By: Pie

Pie — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:30:41 +0000

Lee, excellent point. Renaming it can hide some of the lessons. The lessons learned from those efforts apply everywhere. Technology, by itself, does not solve a problem. It facilitates the solution when the proper analysis is performed. Let us not forget that all IT projects are risky as well, so setting high expectations and depending too heavily on the technology is not a good way to go.

I don’t think we have to wait for the technology before starting. We acknowledge the current limitations and use what we have now. If a mechanism is put in place to evolve the system, and not have it just sit there, then there is hope.

We cannot deliver on true KM now. As I said back in 2001, my kid will sell your company that solution. He is four. What we can do is leverage Enterprise 2.0 to get us to the closer to the true vision and allow people to better capture and share institutional knowledge/information.

I’m going to have to write another post on this one I think.

-Pie

By: Lee Dallas

Lee Dallas — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:10:32 +0000

I fundamentally agree with lopataru – applied technology will eventually yield something that more closely resembles the vision of KM I believe this post espouses.

Over zealous sales people and management looking for a people-less (read that cheaper) way to run their business is at fault for many of the failures in this space.

I am concerned though that renaming runs the risk of encouraging people to repeat the sins of the past with nothing more than a different title page on the project charter. The approach has to change with the nomenclature.

The evolution of the idea is the reintroduction of people into the processing. If that’s Enterprise 2.0 then so be it, but I’m not sure that’s right either.

By: lopataru

lopataru — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 05:55:10 +0000

I agree that human input (such as tagging) alongside new technologies which take social relations into account are a nice step forward "managing information" (yet another term). But I would like to see more innovations in terms of applied technology to make all of this useful. Such as neural networks, knowledge-base methods (like inference) etc. Ok, let's stop dreaming and get back to making search be relevant. Oops.

By: Pie

Pie — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 21:08:04 +0000

KM’s failure was a result of too much promising and the technology not being there yet. It still isn’t. I have no problem killing the term as long as people acknowledge that we are trying to accomplish the same goals with newer tools that makes it easier for users to use the system.

-Pie

By: bex

bex — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 18:40:03 +0000

I’m still unconvinced… why revive an old term like “Knowledge Management” that has so dang much baggage, and that got so many things so horribly wrong?

I say start fresh. The “Enterprise 2.0″ way to proceed would be to accept that KM failed, learn from those failures, and move onwards.