Knowledge management today is essentially social media combined with person-to-person learning, and “cheap and cheerful” systems are often the best, says Gartner analyst Debra Logan.
Logan spoke to ITWeb after her presentation yesterday, at Gartner ITxpo/Symposium Africa, in Cape Town. She recommended that organisations should create, share and consume knowledge with social software, instead of focusing on its capture.
“The problem is that people learn from other people. Knowledge is something I know and I can pass on. Almost all the queries I have had on knowledge management over the past decade or so have actually been about document management systems.
“What upsets me the most is that only 10% or 5% of knowledge that should be captured and formalised by companies has not been done.”
She said early knowledge management consisted of standalone systems that were formalised. The “socialised” knowledge management systems, including user participation, consist of wikis, tags, RSS, linking, blogs and micro-blogs.
“These systems now consist of trusted sources, trusted experts and contain a lot of personal judgment,” she said.
“In some organisations, there may be very few experts in a certain field, where there is a wide-ranging need for those experts to be in multiple places almost at the same time. However, once their expertise is systemised, then others become trained up in that expertise and the need for an expert system goes away.”
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