BLNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

An interesting presentation about blogging as a Knowledge Management tool in large organizations such as Lucent. To me this makes perfect sense. One the largest struggles with KM has alway been to make it as unobtrusive for the user as possible - if you have to record 37 pieces of meta about everything you do, it just won't work. Blogging is both informative and social, yet it inlcudes easy-to-use tools for publishing and XML formats for knowledge aggregation and indexing. If companies can get employee enthusiastic about blogging, they will have a wealth of new knowledge that just wasn't captured previously. The challenge, as I see it, is to make it fun and interesting. So Knowledge Management really boils down to social engineering.

Via Headshift Moments via Conversations with Dina via McGee's Musings via Seb's Open Research

I suppose what worries many companies about blogging in the enterprise sphere is the "outward" facing nature of blogs. By this I don't just mean the "publishing to the outside world" perspective, but the relinquishing of central control and structure. Blogs (or K-logs) are a fantastic tool because of their ability to stimulate more free-form and interactive discussions, and create loose groupings of common interest. The more enlightened and Knowledge-management-focused companies out there are doubtless using the reduced "meta" load of blogs to gain these type of advantages (and some are even using project-based wikis etc.), but I know some companies look at blogs as if they would replace their structured approaches, get scared at this and shy away from them. Blogs are neither a panacea nor a disruptive force, just another useful tool in managing, maintaining and distributing knowledge and information.