Wednesday 20 February 2008

The New KM - a year ago and still spot-on

Ever up-to-the minute, I have just come across this article by David Tebbutt, which encapsulates extremely well my own views on 'KM', and how Web 2.0 tools change that particular game.

I always find David's articles in IWR worth a read.

2 comments:

David Tebbutt said...

Hi Simon. Very kind of you to link to me. If you ever want to chat, feel free to email. david you-know-what tebbo.com.

Simon Carswell said...

Hi David

I find it interesting how social networking software such as Facebook has taken centre stage within the 'Enterprise 2.0' theatre within the last 12 months or so. All very well, but it rather misses the point about how much written material exists and will persist within email unless something's done. And a good start would be more blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging/folksonomy to 'surface' material for wider consumption.

I like your point about how tagging can succeed because nothing other than self-interest is required to motivate people to do it, whilst at the same time a useful navigation system is created for others to benefit from. This, to me, is the genius of del.icio.us and Flickr, and its potential usefulness within an organisation is not to be underestimated. One of the hardest things to do in an organisation, in my experience, is to get people to do something - at least information-related - for the greater good. This isn't because of selfishness, just that they're too busy chasing fairly narrowly-defined objectives. Anything that works at both the level of self interest and that of community has to be worth looking at.