Toward the Knowledge-Enabled Enterprise

There are two things about the field of Knowledge Management that make me crazy.  Now that I think of it there is really only one thing that gets to me - it just takes many forms -- and that is:  Virtually anything can be called knowledge management.

I was in a meeting where a colleague at a former employer pulled out his Palm Pilot and declared, "This is Knowledge Management!"  Well, maybe, kinda, sort of.  An iPhone or Blackberry is not, in and of itself, sufficient to qualify as knowledge management, in my opinion. Content storage may be an enabling technology for Knowledge Management but it is not, in and of itself, knowledge management.  A real understanding of the contents on your storage drive and a strategy for finding it and using it effectively -- that is knowledge management.

I believe that the best Knowledge Management systems are those which enable users to both benefit from and contribute to the knowledge base. This is a key feature of our EXPRESSway product. Ten years ago, in my stint with a former employer, I was called upon to create “knowledge management” with the “stone knives and bear skins” of a shared directory structure on a common server for our practice group. The directive was to create some naming conventions and have everybody put their work on this hard drive. This was an example of Neanderthal culture. Ten years ago, there were companies like Arity doing the forerunners of semantic search, but they weren’t part of the mainstream yet. So, my former work group hobbled along with a directory structure and naming conventions that were rarely followed. No one could find anything. I got phone calls at all hours of the day and night to develop strategies for locating a PowerPoint deck that some colleague knew was somewhere, but he couldn’t remember his rationale for where he’d saved it or why he’d called it whatever he’d called it.

Many have reached the Renaissance culture. We can help you achieve the truly knowledge-enabled culture.