CIO magazine has an excerpt from a new book by Niall Sinclair, Stealth KM: Winning Knowledge Management Strategies for the Private Sector.  Two messages stand out from the usual what-is-KM paragraphs provided.

First, that story telling is alive and well in the corporate world. Stories are an incredibly powerful way to transfer knowledge by combining content, context, and emotion to provide deeper understanding and easier retrieval of information.

Second, that KM is also alive and well in the corporate world. Yep, we're doing it without using the term. Unfortunately that likely means we're not doing it as proficiently as we could be were we to make use of the field of knowledge that exists on the topic already. The author's advice is to go into "stealth mode" makes sense to me. Do the right thing for today's needs, but call it by whatever term your executives prefer so that it can be funded, supported, and effectively implemented.

I recently told a friend of mine that the term "knowledge management" was so "five years ago" as a buzz word, that it made sense that the government agency he works with had just started to look into it. When it came to sharing knowledge among workers, "KM" was the first buzzword to become the darling of the technology press, then "portals" were going to solve all our problems. Millions of dollars were spent based on these predictions, with very little to show for it. "Collaboration" was the next buzzword of choice... if we couldn't make people download their brains into a computer system, maybe we could just get them to talk to each other directly. Currently the "collaboration" frenzy has died down as well. What will the next version of this knowledge sharing concept be called? Maybe it won't have a name at all, but simply progress forward in stealth mode. But don't count on that one lasting, either.  Once we start seeing more "best practices" and less "lessons learned", you can be that someone will coin a new buzzword. Vendors simply can't make money off of stealth technology.

1:23:18 PM    
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