At risk of being accused of jumping on a meme it occurred to me that if the web is transitioning to a new level of activity and a new understanding of what is important then so too is Knowledge Management.
In the early days KM was all about exploiting people's knowledge with gruesome phrases such as "knowledge extraction" and "knowledge capture" being bandied about. Lots of people made lots of money selling overblown concepts and overpriced software both of which under delivered. It was KM's equivalent of the web's dot com era.
Thankfully more and more people are coming to realise that KM, if we persist in using the phrase, is much more about people, connected people, empowered people, people who don't always do what you expect or what you tell them but invariably end up taking you to exciting places you that would never have expected to get to.
>And not only that but you can do this using tools that cost peanuts!
[Later - looks like Dave Winer and the NYT agree with me]
I've always argued one of the challenges has been the title 'knowledge management'. Better to call it 'knowledge support' and then you start focusing on where the value lies, in people not tools.
Having only just started a blog, I posted an entry about it here: http://www.joiningdots.net/blog/2005/09/knowledge-support-not-management.html
Posted by: joining dots | October 07, 2005 at 03:28 PM