Ellen Finkelstein has a number of good links and observations about how knowledge management is meeting blogging and other looser forms of communication. Thanks go to Mike D for these links:
- The blog as a knowledge management system
- The duality of knowledge
- How to share knowledge like a librarian
Linked off Ellen's site is a couple of interesting articles and papers.
The duality of knowledge - Paul Hildreth and Chris Kimble
This paper was written in 2002 as a response to the growing number of knowledge management systems appearing that focused on purely collecting raw data without taking into account the personal nature of much of this information. The paper has a number of very useful background references for general knowledge management principles and the definition of 'know-how' and 'know-what' knowledge (or hard knowledge vs soft knowledge). There have been so many papers written about this subject that they all come across as being very boring (the Postgraduate Conference in 2004 at Manchester was stock full of such papers) and you can't help but feel a whole lot of people are reiterating the same pieces of information just to fill in pages for conference proceedings. Nevertheless this paper has a number of good diagrams and tables that help illustrate the points. The paper was written before the rise of blogging but it does begin to outline how technology based processes could begin to farm this soft knowledge resource.
Blogs in Business: The weblog as a filing cabinet
This is a blog posting by Dave Pollard that has some pretty nice concise obversations. His primary observation is that for too long we have focused on getting all the obvious pieces of data recorded without spending much time thinking about how these pieces of data relate to the understanding and relationships within the business processes themselves. He summarizes his thinking in a very good passage:
"Weblogs could be a mechanism to coherently codify and 'publish' in a completely voluntary and personal manner the individual worker's entire filing cabinet, complete with annotations, marginalia, post-its and personal indexing system."
He goes on to highlight some benefits of the blogging process, namely that it could potentially tap into the 'codified knowledge resource' that is email and that systems could easily be established to work within corporate firewall constraints (intranet based blogs vs publicly accessible ones). He balances these observations with a few warnings about how these systems could not be viewed as the silver bullet as perhaps previous knowledge management systems were. In his words again:
"They represent the best-yet compromise between the anarchy of personal websites on the Intranet, and the straight-jacket of most 'corporate owned' repositories."