Having so many social network services to chose from, and so many contacts, it's easy to forget who is where, and what they're up to.
Thankfully, although it's annoying at times, most of these services let you know when someone "friends you," "favorites you," or adds you as a contact.
I'm in a deep Knowledge Management (KM) mood recently, probably because as we've been putting together our Practitioner Training on Enterprise 2.0 (almost done), I've been talking quite a bit about KM. And I mean literally talking about it... for days... just me and my laptop as I've been wrapping up recording somewhere around 9 hours of audio. Not quite as much fun as you might think... ;)
So, swimming in the KM waters once again, and SlideShare.net (which I use to embed presentations here from time to time - very handy little service), notifies me that Stan Garfield has added me as a friend.
What a great blast from the past! I'd interviewed Stan last year, on the topic of "Reinvention Prevention" - fantastic interview, and Stan is one well-seasoned guy. He completely understands KM, the issues of incentivization, taking KM out of KM 1.0 and along for the ride with Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.
If you aren't following his blogging and presentations, well, what are you waiting for?
I'll save you one trip, and have embedded his presentation, Knowledge Management in the Real World, as seen on Slideshare, below (follow the "View" link if the embedded copy doesn't work).
I knew HP (where Stan leads the Worldwide Knowledge Management program in HP's Services arm) was advanced in their KM thinking, but had no idea how advanced. As seen in Stan's presentation, they have a n array of tools, to cover the gamut of interactions, knowledge sharing, knowledge seeking, re-use, and more that goes on within the (virtual) walls of HP.
Between HP and IBM, it's quite amazing to see how large professional services organizations can be so nimble. Embarassing even, for most other organizations.
My point, folks, is that if you're sitting on the sidelines, waiting until social networking, blogs, wikis, collaboration, etc. "get real" before you start adopting them. Well, you're already too late! Of course that's never true, but if you don't get started, you will surely never see any value as a result.
More on that next week, when we release our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 - but I'll sum it up as this...
You can get moving nearly instantly, and free to pretty low cost (per user) with many of these capabilities. You want integration to existing systems? Well, that will take more work, but still, likely easier than you're expecting (a bonus of the standards that are powering mashups et al).
But, the sooner you start running, the more likely you are to catch up and surpass your competitors who, right now, are more agile, able to recognize new threats and opportunities, and bring their experiences to bear to keep oriented towards the future.
What do YOU think? Is KM alive again? Did it ever die? Is it just a buzzword that refuses to go away?
And for the ~70 people who responded to our Enterprise 2.0 survey saying they'd be interested in participating in a writeup of their case studies, stay tuned, we'll be in touch shortly.
Feel free to prime the pump in comments here though, if you would like to talk about your successes OR failures.
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