What is KM again
I came across Rebecca Thomas' EducationNiche by way of my Feedster search on KM. She is a KM-skeptic, but has been posting on the topic nonetheless. I appreciate what she is talking about, because it is far too easy to get caught up in KM as a "cool tool" without getting at the spirit around devising better ways to work with your intellectual capital.
An example: in a recent entry, Is it knowledge management or not?, she found a reference to KM in hiring methods article and says,
Perhaps I've missed something here, but how does the consideration of hiring methods ever warrant being defined as knowledge management? I realize I criticize knowledge management a lot, but I think this example just furthers my belief that knowledge management is not a useful practice because nobody knows what it is. Even CLOs seem to have problems figuring it out and agreeing on what that term means.
An entertaining note: The Google Ads that appeared when I visited were for four different knowledge management software packages.
[original date: 11/18/2004 11:48:46 PM]
I continue to read and post on knowledge management because it is a topic I'm interested in, even if I don't subscribe to the bandwagon. I think the basic theory behind an knowledge-based subculture in a corporation is a good one and I can see the practical applications of it.
However, I also took one three-part KM course where each part defined KM in contradictory ways and handled the components of KM in very different ways. Then I started reading about KM on the web and that was like trying to read a number of different books out of the gardening section of a book store. There was a very vague unifying theme to the reading, but they were all growing different types of plants.
Oh, I'm actually amused that the Google Ads are displaying KM-relevant ads. It was showing nothing but Blue's Clues the entire first week I had them in place.
Cheers!