KM is a Social Phenomenon Jim McGee follows up his aggregator bricolage on weblogs and knowledge management with a part 2.
He includes Rick Klau on Gartner's hype cycle, Dina Mehta's perspective on the challenges of introducing weblogs into corporate environments, Jon Udell on using weblogs to improve project communications and other great posts. Specifically notes that ease of set up, as well as use, are qunitessential.
Jim picks up a gem by Gary Murphy at TeledyN and adds the pointed comment that KM is a social phenomenon:
Both searches were initially pointless because, for very good reasons, both the sought after data items did not exist in the superficially logical locations. This is probably the number one flaw with most dead-robot KM systems: They fail to accommodate how Reality is inherently messy!
The only possible method to locate either the ribs or the cards was to do what humans have done since the dawn of archives, ask someone who knows. In both instances, we needed someone who knew where the target was, and who could refer us to someone who knew how to extract it.
Murphy provides the critical link here between weblogs and organizational need. It is the realization that KM in organizational settings is primarily a social phenomenon and not a technology one. Most prior efforts to apply technology to KM problems in organizations have been solutions in search of a problem. They have been driven by a technology vendor's need to sell product, not an organization's need to solve problems.
Weblogs are interesting in organizational KM settings because weblogs are technologically simple and socially complex, which makes them a much better match to the KM problems that matter. One thing that we need to do next is to work backwards from the answer - weblogs - to the problem - what do organizations need to do effective knowledge management. We need to avoid the mistakes of other KM software vendors and not assume that the connection is self-evident. [McGee's Musings]
1:56:34 PM
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