This is an interesting thread on Slashdot. Someone asked about capturing, organizing, and sharing knowledge in an IT department and the majority of folks are responding with various wiki tools and open source portals. Although the question was directed at the needs of an IT department, the advice is probably applicable to any department in an enterprise, provided the UI of the chosen tool scores high in the usability department.

Knowledge Management for an IT Department?. Slashdot Sep 30 2005 8:25PM GMT [Moreover Technologies - Knowledge management news]

The key issues, as I've mentioned before are:

• it has to be easy to contribute content
• it has to be easy to find content (via search and possibly taxonomy browsing)
• it has to be secure
• it has to have all of the "-abilities" (eg, scalability, extensibility, usability, etc.).

Something like a combination of blogs, wikis, possibly a document repository, and a search engine for the whole thing ought to do the trick.

11:37:52 AM    

This is worth a read. It has definite applicability to corporate use of wiki and blog technology. The key paragraph is

The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community. Bill Ives finds a nice report on the use of new technology within the intelligence community...

The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community. Here is an article by Calvin Andrus of the CIA on how they can use blogs and wikis to help them change, The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community, which is not a bad idea. As... [Portals and KM]

 

[McGee's Musings]

Note that the Stanford Law School link to the PDF does not require registration.

I definitely like the idea of using the repository as a sort of loosely organized collection point for raw knowledge. At Navigator we call this the "unstructured data warehouse". It needs to be secure and I suppose it needs some amount of organization but the key is to make it easy for employees to contribute, easy to administer, and as open as possible.

Then, on top of that you add tools to glean intelligence from the warehouse (ie wikis) and a mechanism for expressing opinions about that separately (blogs). Index the whole shooting-match with a search engine and you've got something.

The final ingredient is incentive. You've got to make it beneficial for employees to leverage this infrastructure (and painful if they don't!).

1:02:22 PM    

This would be a cool corporate blogging feature...

AOL Opens Blog Service to IM Users. Members of AOL Instant Messenger gain connections to the AOL Journals blogging tool, including the ability to send posts through instant messages. [eWEEK Technology News]

5:45:06 PM    

"Technology" is one of the three converging forces. Under that heading, Charlie notes how blogs and CMS/Portals are converging.

Technology: the perfect storm for portals?. Charlie Wood has written a blog entry on the uncertain future of portals. To quote: The enterprise portal industry stands squarely in the path of three converging forces, any one of which could be devastating. Together, they might be fatal.... [Column Two]

11:28:19 AM    

The March 28 issue of Infoworld has a cover story on corporate blogging called The Enterprise Blogosphere. It covers both blogs and wikis in the corporate environment and sidebars on JotSpot, Movable Type, TWiki, and Socialtext.

4:58:19 PM