RE: Some thoughts on knowledge management, content management and single sourcing

["Lisa Wright" <liwright -at- earthlink -dot- net>]

John Posada wrote:
> What kind of knowledge management are we talkiing about here.
> 
> 1) Making sure that everyone in a corporation who knows or learns 
> something, documents it, or
> 
> 2) Having a central repository where all information that a 
> corporation produces is available. Here, I'm thinking Documentum for 
> millions of gigs of research data, or Siebel where an 18,000 member 
> sales force and sales support go to for all parts of the sales 
> process, from lead qualification to money collection.
> 
> ??
> 
> Until this thread, I thought Knoledgement Management was number 2.

And Andrew Plato wrote:
My conception is that KM is more like 1. 

2 would be source control or simple data warehousing.
<end quotes>

I tend to agree with John. Centrally accessible knowledge seems to be
one key component to knowledge management. Source control and data
warehousing only apply to a small portion of the "knowledge" that some
firms have--it depends entirely on the line of business, and also on the
department. And actually they may not even be relevant, now that I think
about it. A data warehouse captures facts and relates them to each other
in different ways than in their original form. It doesn't tell you what
the sales person with 15 years experience knows to apply to those facts.
Data mining can only expose data patterns. It can't tell you what to do
about them. Systems that we have right now are largely designed to
capture facts. Perhaps that's why the KM concept is difficult. It's
trying to get people to capture the stuff that can't be thrown into a
relational database. 

Yes, if I know something, then I should document it, and my corporate
culture should encourage that. But if I don't also have a system that
makes it readily accessible to other employees, then it's still in a
black hole. So, many initiatives are to provide the system
infrastructure to enable making that knowledge available.

I think "just do it" is only half of the equation. You also have to
enable the organization to make use of the information.

Okay, enough debating for me today.

Lisa


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