Web 2.0 needs IM & KM Consulting more than ever!

Once again, the pendulum swings. From structured to

unstructured. From planning to instant gratification.

Yet it has always been both/and and not either/or.

Apparently, now, we do not need KM and KM Consultants
because blogging, wiki's, RSS feeds, iPod, Flickr,
MySpace, YouTube ..you name it..will do it all for us!

Google, Semantic Web and Autonomy still march
on, developing and improving multimedia search and
better meaning.

So now we have lots more of our valuable tacit knowledge
captured all over the place, everywhere, easily, and found by
others, everywhere, easily, within hours globally. Fantastic but ....

I remember, at a KM conference in the mid 1990's, the story
of a legal firm who were so please to give everybody in the firm
a laptop PC. Such a powerful tool for mobile email at the time.

The only problem was that nobody filed their correspondence in
the traditional 'paper based' client file anymore, only
on their own PC, so nobody could get at a central repository to
see the complete picture. The valuable information was
scattered around all the personal PC's instead. This is not a reason

to go back to snail mail, but a reason to teach people how to use these

new tools to maximise personal, team, organisational, and

inter-organisational knowledge.

I cannot help but see the same thing happening with these
wonderful new tools. Even more valuable, rich information
and knowledge is captured and scatterd throughout the Web.

This is simply fantastic, but, what organisations need, even more
than ever before, is:

1. help to develop effective information and knowledge strategies, that

maximise the best processes, methods, tools and technologies,
to better achieve objectives, at the top level

2. help to develop more naturally flourishing knowledge communities
and networks, using these new tools and technologies

3. help to produce more innovative business processes,
embedding these new tools and technologies

4. help to teach knowledge workers how to use these new methods, tools
and technologies, to better communicate,
collaborate, learn, share and apply knowledge

Web 3.0 tool developers, like Radar Networks, promise even more
meaning and automation!

So I put it to you that Web 2.0, and future methods, tools
and technologies that emerge, will give us all simply unbelievable and
extraordinary potential to work in totally new ways.

But to optimise them, will require even more information management
and knowledge management consulting - strategic, people centric,
process centric and effective knowledge working centric - than ever
before?

Ron Young

For more information:

www.knowledge-management-online.com