My beliefs about post-modern Knowledge Management

In my current world view, I have a few beliefs:

1. Enterprise knowledge needs to be public (to all employees) by default and private only if there’s a very, very good reason for it.
2. Knowledge sharing needs to move from being part of closed channels to open platforms.
3. People should have a choice to collaborate privately, but have the support to easily make their private knowledge public.
4. Discussions and conversations should get organised using tags and metadata as against separate mailing lists and groups. People should have the option to subscribe using email, but this shouldn’t be the default.
5. Knowledge managers need to define, maintain and protect the structure of ’no initial structure’. The structure should emerge over time using tags, ratings and user input. This however needs continuous involvement with all communities and is by no means easy.
6. Content stewardship is key — things don’t happen on their own. Knowledge managers need to keep their eye out for quality content on private channels/ spaces. They need to have the agility and presence of mind to move this to being organisational knowledge with a strong incentive for the authors. This is essential to the process of long lasting change.”

On the topic of keeping track of quality content I recommend the following further reading on content intelligence.

On the topic of email subscriptions I would remind not to forget offering an RSS feed, which for some people is preferred over email subscriptions especially in case there are a lot of updates.

On the topic of letting users tag their content and having a good search engine, I would like to add the importance of aligning the information architecture in an enterprise, which could mean that in addition to free tags everything also needs to be tagged with the names of applicable offerings, services and solutions from the enterprise’s portfolio.