“Re: What is Knowledge Management?”

What is Knowledge Management?> Knowledge Management is is a topic for organizations, not for individuals.

This is correct. It is, however, important for the individuals (at some level) to understand the organizational needs and vice versa.

I'm delving into TopicMaps and XTM. Fascinating stuff. But once again it seems like a technological concept that is just LIGHT years ahead of what the people in the field are able to grasp. Not just utilize, I'm saying the managers in the various departments responsible for collecting and managing the data can't even GRASP why doing complex topic management is worthwhile. This leads back to the creators of the software being used by these people. The programmers have even less grasp of the need. It's a chicken versus the egg paradox. One point, however, this is why environments like Microsoft's Office are scriptable. But the programmers that put the scripting into the environment haven't been backed up by a viable marketing campaign that educates the public on WHY this is a very valuable feature. Instead we just get more single-user consultants ranting about how evil scripting can be.

Getting knowledge into a manageable condition requires collecting meta-data during the entire process of it's collection. This is unfortunately not being effectively implemented in most situations.

-Bill Kearney