Re: Some thoughts on knowledge management,-- content management and single sourcing

["Bill Hall" <bill -dot- hall -at- hotkey -dot- net -dot- au>]

At home for dinner on my way to the airport to continue our KM audit on
other parts of our organization.

John Posada said,

"What kind of knowledge management are we talking about here.

1) Making sure that everyone in a corporation who knows or learns
something, documents it, or

2) Having a central repository where all information that a
corporation produces is available. Here, I'm thinking Documentum for
millions of gigs of research data, or Siebel where an 18,000 member
sales force and sales support go to for all parts of the sales
process, from lead qualification to money collection.
"

Andrew Plato said,

"My conception is that KM is more like 1.

2 would be source control or simple data warehousing."

Actually, a good corporate system should provide both (all) functions
through the one portal - and we are not far from having technology to do all
of that. The important thing is that technical communicators need to be
heavily involved in the processes followed to define the needs, write the
specifications, see that what is captured is genuinely useful knowledge and
see that it is usefully catalogued and indexed for end-user retrieval.
Because many KM consultants have a very partial view of what it is that
knowledge management systems should manage, they can convince organizations
to spend scarce infrastructure dollars on capturing tacit knowledge and miss
major gains that can be made from providing practical access to knowledge
that has already been codified and documented.

Keep the thread going, I am sure others must have something useful to
contribute here. If my remote dial-in actually works, I may be able to stay
tuned in while on the road. Given that I am currently immersed in this
process, any further discussion will help to clarify the issues I face.

Regards,

Bill Hall
------------------------------------------
Information is not knowledge
Knowledge is not wisdom
Wisdom is not truth
Truth is not beauty
Beauty is not love
Love is not music
Music is THE BEST
-----------------------------
(Zappa - Packard Goose)


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