|
KMWorld 2000;
Why Should we Care?
The KMWorld 2000 Conference was held
this September at the convention center in Santa Clara. For
those of you that are not familiar with KM, it is the acronym for
Knowledge Management. But for those of you who are
technologists, what is knowledge management? And why should we
care? In it's simplest form,
knowledge management is the combination of two words:
- Knowledge: familiarity,
awareness, or understanding gained through experience or study
- Management: practice of managing;
handling, supervising, or control
But knowledge management is far more
than the combination of these two words. Some definitions I
gathered during the conference included:
- Knowledge Management: organizational
processes that seek synergistic combination of data and
information processing capacity of information technologies, and
the creative and innovative capacity of human beings
- Knowledge Management: the
ability to share and allow others to apply insights,
understandings and practical know-how that all individuals
possess.
- Knowledge Management: the
intersection of organization theory, management strategy and
management information systems
One of the most important things I
learned from attending to the KMWorld conference is first that there
is a great difference between Knowledge Management and Knowledge
Technologies. According to Barbara Smith, Director of Knowledge
Management at IBM, "KM is holistic."
It involves the entire enterprise. Knowledge management focuses on
how to find enterprise knowledge and how to capture it. For
those of us with roots in publishing or IT, we would expect to find
enterprise knowledge already captured in existing documents and
databases. But it turns out that enterprise knowledge management is much more
organic than that. The identification of enterprise knowledge
begins with identifying which human resources hold untapped
knowledge. Then there must be strategies for human knowledge
capture. And finally is the capability to organize or manage
this knowledge for the good of the enterprise. It turns out that
Knowledge Technologies are important to the KM world, but it is only a
small "slice" of what KM focuses on.
The other revelation at KMWorld was the
amazing lack of standards and the lack of adoption (or even knowledge
of) W3C or ISO standards by vendors of technologies in the KM
marketplace. Some vendors were using XML. A few were aware
of other Web standards. But for the most part, KM product
offerings appeared to be proprietary, even to the specification for
the style of the user interface (where CSS or XSL could have been
easily used). One explanation could be that KM primarily
addresses knowledge within an enterprise and not cross enterprise
boundaries. So, in this environment, a proprietary offering
might be more acceptable. The users of KM solutions, however,
are intent on learning about standards and learning about knowledge
technologies that comply to standards. The KM world represents a
great new market place for knowledge technologies coming from the
information technologies community. Likewise current vendors in the
KM marketplace will be valuable new members of the emerging knowledge
technologies community. KMWorld
2000; why should we care? My answer is that the KMWorld
Conference provides valuable academic content for anyone interested in
introducing knowledge technologies and standards to the knowledge
management community. KMWorld is also a great place to
network. Meeting new people with new requirements for knowledge
technologies is both informative and exciting.
Return
to TOC
|
