Maybe KM won't save intranets

Shorewalker wrotes about that Line56 article on intranet trends too, but had a very different conclusion than I did: Intranets look vainly to knowledge management

I have been watching the knowledge management boom for 15 years. I would love to belive that knowledge management was a valuable field. But to the extent that it's about capturing "knowledge" in documents, it goes against everything I know about successful organisations. Like artificial intelligence, it seems based on a mistaken idea about what knowledge is, and about how knowledge-based economies function. I've thrown my lot in with Peter Drucker, who knows all about knowledge-based economies but who famously declared that "you can't manage knowledge".

He goes on with an excellent discussion of why the focus on technology won't work to create KM. At some point the technology just scrapes the surface of what KM might do in an organization. It's the people that carry the knowledge and attempt to share with one another and learn from interactions with each other.

I think where the Line56 trends article was going was that with the technologies and history of KM, there are new opportunities to do useful things for organizations beyond that stale "yellow pages."

[thanks to Column Two for the pointer]