[LIS-Forum] The new knowledge management?

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 12:52:04 +0530
From: dhanu.pattanashetti at accenture.com

The new knowledge management?

By Christopher Harris-Jones, Ovum

11 January 2007



The key objective of knowledge management (KM) is to make the expertise
of individuals more widely available, and used, across the organisation.
Effective delivery of KM has two major aspects. The first is the
cultural, social and interpersonal element of encouraging people to
share their knowledge and expertise, which is the most difficult element
to implement effectively in organisations. The second aspect is the
implementation of technology to support these activities, which is
relatively straightforward in comparison with softer people-issues. The
technologies used for KM have typically come from the collaboration
software sector - for example discussion groups, workspaces and
communication technologies (such as audio and video conferencing) - and
these software tools are well developed.

One of the perennial problems of KM has been to encourage people to
share their knowledge. The rise of 'social media' such as blogs and
wikis has seen a huge outburst of people wanting to share selected
information (such as video clips). While this is hardly KM, it is a
significant increase in the use of the Web to record and exchange
information. Changes like these that happen voluntarily in the consumer
sector have a habit of percolating into the corporate sector, which
potentially gives a significant boost to the use of collaboration tools.

However, any change in mindset is not always going to be helpful. A
significant element of the motivation for the use of social networking
tools is to publish rather than to use or re-use. One of the
requirements of effective KM is to get the right people to share the
right pieces of knowledge and expertise. While social media encourages
sharing, it is not necessarily the right kind of sharing that will
support effective KM and improve company performance.

Access the complete report by Ovum : Social networks, collaboration and
KM: spot the joins

http://www2.ovum.com/secure/p,50433,67075,68704

Regards,

Dhanukumar M. Pattanashetti
Knowledge Management Development Center (KMDC)
ACCENTURE
Bangalore