KM and Blogger up a tree

We’re not dead or anything, nor are we suffering Cipro side-effects. We are still hurt, tired, and emotional over the fact that our costumes, featuring gas mask and confectioner’s-sugar full-body covering, went over so very poorly at the local leather bar come Hallowe’en. But that shall pass, we suppose, even if lifelong scars remain.

It’s been a slow news week for le monde du contenu. But picture our surprise, six months after broaching the subject, to locate yet another article about the potential of blogging for “knowledge management.”

One of the tough tasks in KM is getting expertise located in an organization (that is, figuring out who has it on a subject by subject basis).... Toughest of all is getting the experts to agree to share their expertise with others, except as part of their regular job. Employees who have spent a career lifetime enhancing their value because they “know” something others don’t are logically reluctant to give away their valuable expertise and, in that process, lose some or all of their value.

In fact, plans to implement knowledge management often require prior exercises in changing corporate culture, moving employees from a gatekeeper culture, where knowledge is kept hidden and produced only when it can enhance the employee’s value, to a sharing culture, where knowledge sharing is encouraged and rewarded....

But what if the two – blogging and KM – got together? [...] If these Weblogs were collected by the KM system and then indexed by a spider against an organizational taxonomy (list of categories) that was optimized for the organization, its interests, and its experts; [i]f organizational employees could search for collections of expertise by topic (or, as they became aware of their identity, by expert), assisted by the spidered Weblogs....

Knowledge management offers the possibility of allowing organizations to tap into not just the documents they’ve created, but the expertise of their employees, past and present. Weblogging is interesting because it is a fairly non-intrusive way of allowing workers to share the process by which they seek, analysis, and select information.

We start off with an unlikely yet maniacally-hyperdetailed amalgam of corporate management trend and online content format, then find another half a year later – united here for the very first time.

We just love playing yenta!

Posted on 2001-11-06