As soon as there is a tipping point of consensus around some portion of KM, that portion will be culled and worked as its own space. Each time this happens, it leaves KM as the vague parent aging and becoming more “out of touch”. Of course, with age comes wisdom and there will always be pearls of wisdom to come from the KM community.

But, IMHO don’t look for some big KM resurgence.

The current (positive) tension between the human side focused on knowledge sharing and the technology side focused on access and means of sharing is better targeted. However, there is a danger that knowledge management becomes little more than opinion management. And, without attention paid to adequate record-keeping, regardless of media and format, the risk to organizations is significant.

Perhaps simply knowing is not enough. We must be able to ground knowledge with a certain rigour applied to its formation.

There are a number of current trends that suggest that, as Rajiv Deo says, the right time is now (if not yesterday). Public interest in accountability and transparency has been high over the last year or so. This creates a tolerance for the work necessary to get there…I sense that without another crisis, this tolerance is lessening. And, reliance (and trust) in balance sheets as an indicator of safe investment has taken a hit. Means to reveal the intellectual capital of the enterprise offer a more reliable indicator of sustainable progress…but this seems to require (a) a shift in the definition of growth from acquisition to productivity and (b) underpinnings that tie the promise of knowledge and intellectual capital management to the evidence base.

Interesting times. Opportunity for reflection over the last many months has the ideas flowing….now to find the language!

Many CIOs are still trying to squeeze efficiencies out of the operations by cutting costs and streamlining services rather than allowing their people to build capability and deliver extraordinary performance.

Intellectual assets are the only organizational assets that grow in value the more that you use them. That’s what us KM mangers do – we help organizations grow and better use their intellectual assets. The fact that this represents %70 of the value of most organizations is quite galling.

keep on blogging French

Quite right. But unfortunately, the information often gets garbled the game of “telephone” that happens as it is transmitted to the IT folks.

We address that part of the alignment gap with a Wiki for executable English. The information is in English, so it helps to ‘debug’ it by running it over sample data, and then inspecting English explanations of the results.

Or, to put it another way, the above is a technical means to tighten the coordination between business and IT.

The Wiki for executable English is online at http://www.reengineeringllc.com, and shared use is free.