KM, as a discipline, has been disrupted by distruptive technologies

It was Professor Charles Handy who first introduced me to the idea
of disruptive technologies, and the impact they have, in his best
selling book 'The Age of Unreason' in 1989.

It was Intel that reinforced the disruptive power of rapidly emerging
technologies in Business, in the mid 1990's, when they talked about
significantly disruptive inflexion points.

Today, I put to you, the new technologies that we happily refer to as
Web 2.0, have totally disrupted Knowledge Management, as a
discipline for practitioners.

We started, in the 1990's, by developing methodologies and processes that
would enable us to better capture, store, share, amplify, create and
apply, new knowledge, for individuals, teams, organisations and
communities. Very good work at the time.

But today wiki's enable a radically new way to collectively create new
knowledge, and blogs enable a radically new way to capture, store
and share new learnings and insights, and YouTube, Flickr, Myspace
etc are all enabling richer and more collaborative communities,
although somewhat disparate at the moment .

I realise, as written in an earlier blog of mine, that Web 2.0
technologies do not address the higher stages of the KM process,
but I am confident that the promised Web 3.0 tools, the Semantic Web
developments, automated meaning and metadata technologies
will address this stage soon.

So, I put it to you that Knowledge Management, as a practitioner
discipline, has been significantly disrupted by disruptive
technologies.

Having said that, I believe, therefore, that the need for a good
Knowledge management strategy, of which technology is a key
part, is even more important.

Ron Young

More at:
www.knowledge-management-online.com