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The field of Knowledge Management (KM) has existed for about a decade, and after an initial flurry of enthusiasm (at one point six of the top ten business best-sellers were about KM) it has fallen into disarray. Part of the problem is that the field has been dominated by three largely disconnected groups:
Academics & business gurus, who write about theory that is too general and abstract to have much practical application,
Knowledge managers and project managers who cobble together pragmatic custom applications, often in an undisciplined and unsustainable way, applications that are often abandoned as needs, roles and technologies change, and
IT managers who, with the best of intentions, buy and install commercial 'KM tools' that never get much front-line take-up
Ten years later many organizations have little to show for large investments in promising KM tools, projects and infrastructure. What went wrong, and is it too late to save KM from the scrap heap of failed management fads?
I believe one cause of the failure of KM was the attempt to build generalized tools that were expected to have application in almost all industries and business processes. Such tools work well enough in the old financial information (FIS), sales and marketing (SMIS) and human resources (HRIS) systems. In these 'classical' IT systems, both the content (financial, customer and employee data) and the application (financial statements, customer reports and employee records) are relatively standard across a wide variety of industries.
By contrast, knowledge content (like leading practices, industry analyses and methodologies) is particular to each industry and to each department and process within ...