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Caveat emptor is Latin for ”buyer beware”; this gem of wisdom has been passed down to us from Roman times, and in some ways it’s an example of Knowledge Management (KM) in action — a nugget of ‘knowledge’ that countless generations have found to be valuable, and so passed on by word of mouth, clay tablets, scrolls or more recently books and websites!
When you consider your organization's KM strategy in the context of your content management and collaboration environments, then I would re-iterate “buyer beware”, particularly the be wary of any vendor who wants to sell you an “end to end” knowledge management solution.
I would suggest there is no such thing as a “KM system” as in a single piece or suite of software, in the mold of “one ring to rule them all”.
It's Your Knowledge Management Strategy
Your KM environment and your KM strategy, if you have one at all, will be highly contextual to your particular organization; and should reflect its strategic aims, goals and objectives. I believe that to achieve a ‘knowledge enabled’ enterprise requires massive HR input. KM needs to be built into appraisal and career development systems, organizational learning and individual learning and development and even compensation systems.
However, KM initiatives often seem to fall back on implementing some new technology in the hope that it will provide a silver bullet solution. I do agree that good information management does provide a solid bedrock for KM, and so it appears do many others as content management, collaboration and enterprise search are often cast in the silver bullet role.
From KM 1.0 to KM 2.0
A few years ago in a keynote at Information Online in London, David Gurteen spoke about the failure of “KM1.0”. He suggested that having to add certain documents into a DMS, or put information into a Knowledge Base system was mostly doomed to failure as these were onerous additional tasks, outside of an individuals core work flow.
He suggested that the use of Web 2.0 tools could produce an era of KM 2.0, where easy to use tools would allow knowledge workers to see the relationships between disparate pieces of information, and make links between information and people.
To me this is part of the utility Enterprise 2.0 frameworks, such as Prof. McAfee’s original SLATES and Dion Hinchcliffe’s extension of into FLATNESSES model. You can use these frameworks to assess products in an attempt to understand what they might bring to your more pragmatic KM efforts.
Knowledge Management Tools
Returning to the importance of context, for a global pharmaceutical (a highly regulated industry) KM is not the same as it for the U.S. Army (who brought us modern variants of After Action Reports and Lessons Learned). So what tools you will need will depend on your contextual requirements, and the output of your requirements analysis, but it may include one or more of the following:
Document Centric Collaboration
For example, MS SharePoint Team sites, EMC eRoom/CenterStage or Lotus Quickr are workspaces for collaborative information creation and editing, using tools such as blogs, wikis and forums to add context to documents, which enables individuals to process information and develop knowledge.
A view of a SharePoint document library
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