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