A person stuck in KM1.0 spends much of their time maintaining their various content repositories.  Unfortunately, it can be hard to keep up with those maintenance tasks.  And if you fall behind, it becomes increasingly difficult to retrieve your content — even if that content is pure gold.  If you have dross mixed in with [...]

There is an old adage: “A place for every thing and every thing in its place.” And yet, if you’ve ever shared space with another human being, you know how hard it can be to (i) identify that one place and (ii) get everyone to put each thing in its “proper” place. (As I write, [...]

Mark McGuinness would like you to test your perception. Take a moment to read his post, Are You Trapped in Black-and-White Thinking, and then tell me which square is darker. He uses this test to illustrate his concern about our tendency to think concretely in black and white terms — no ambiguities, no shades of [...]

A sidebar e-mail conversation with some thoughtful readers of my earlier post, Is Your Knowledge Management Strategic, raised the following interesting question: How do you find out if you have the necessary content and processes without doing a full-blown knowledge audit, yet how do you avoid the dangers of the knowledge audit? Dangers, you ask? [...]

My last post talked about the dangers of letting baby boomers slip out the door without first ensuring that they had left in their firm’s KM system “knowledge nuggets” containing their accumulated experience and learning.  That post was intended to be a warning to knowledge managers.  But perhaps we should launch a parallel appeal to [...]

The destruction of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 was one of those events that seared the nation. After the inquiry into the accident was complete, we learned that a small defective O-ring seal had led to the disaster. Similarly, when the space shuttle Columbia exploded in mid-air in 2003, we learned that a piece [...]

The best search engine in the world cannot convert garbage into useful content. So, before you spend megabucks on the latest cool search tool, think about what repository you’re searching. If your office is anything like most offices, you’ve got tons of ephemera — stuff that probably isn’t going to matter 30 minutes from now [...]

In my last post I discussed Hardwiring KM Into Your Client Work as a way of improving your chances of actually capturing knowledge and making it available for reuse. The focus there was on specifically planning to capture knowledge and then organizing your project around that goal. But how do you actually capture that knowledge? [...]

If you want good knowledge management results, you have to find a way to bridge the divide in your colleagues’ minds between getting their job done and doing KM. If they have a choice between racing to meet client needs and stopping to select and contribute content for the KM system, they will choose their [...]