Euan Semple on his blog has a mini round up on the current state the Knowledge Management movement. Naturally, he’s opinionated on the subject:
“Compare Dave Snowden’s eminently sensible and insightful analysis of the current state of KM with this load of complete bollocks.”
From the first link,
Now don’t get me wrong, the objectives of KM theory and practice persist and will continue to be of great importance. They are clear, simple and important and can be summarised as follows:
1. To support effective decision making
2. To create the conditions for innovationAll the methods and tools of KM from communities of practice to corporate taxonomies are subordinate to those two primary goals. In so far as the IT function supports those goals and continues to use the term KM then it will persist.
A lot of what is happening in the Enterprise 2.0 builds on these exact same objectives as Knowledge Management (Wikepedia link). The twist being that Enterprise2.0 takes the “social”-ish or emergent path rather than the more traditional top-down (as I understand them) methodologies of classic KM.
Euan’s early successes and experiments with introducing some very basic “social media” tools to the sprawling organization that is the BBC was one my own primary inspirations for embarking on the Firestoker project.
If you wan’t to know why… Here is Euan Semple at Lift06 – essential watching, for anyone interested in Enterprise20 or … how to 2.0-the-hell-out of KM
(from the opening line “knowledge management, does anyone even talk like that anymore?…”)