lclough wrote:
] ] KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT revolves around the concept that one
] ] of the most valuable corporate assets is the experience
] ] and expertise floating around inside employees' heads. In
] ] order to manage this intellectual capital, executives
] ] must devise a way to capture and share that knowledge
] ] with coworkers. If done right, KM is supposed to create a
] ] more collaborative environment, cut down on duplication
] ] of effort and encourage knowledge sharing
]
] Stumbled over this looking for information about CereByte, a
] KM software company in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

I find KM to be a very interesting field of study, but i think it made the jump from research lab to business world a little too early perhaps. Part of my consultant job for the past year was to investigate and evaluate KM systems for my organiztion. It became brutally obvious early on that the cultural changes required to make use of these incredibly expensive bits of software overshadowed the technical challenges by about 50:1.

Seems to me that for KM to work well in corporate environments, it has to be transparent, which means it either has to be VERY smart and automatically learn how to share knowledge and with whom (no systems i found appeared to be anywhere close to this sophisticated) or the technology has to closely match the existing corporate culture of information sharing, and augment it.

KM on an individual level is another story of course... one which i've got some opinions on and which i think will profoundly alter the way individuals address information and knoweldge that is important to them. Looks like MS' next gen filesystem is incorporating some useful concepts (looking for content specifically, rather than organizing a hierarchy of folders to structure your conceptual knowledge) and there are a few open source programs that look towards individual KM-- Haystack (an MIT project, check freshmeat) being the most advanced. I don't think anyone's got it right yet, but it's only a matter of time.