Thank you for the feedback and expansion of your point, Doug.

Murrayjennex wrote:

So I guess to me the real future issue for KM is switching from a fascination with having technology create and capture knowledge and moving to a KMS that supports linking knowledge sources/users and facilitates and captures the conversations between them and the decision that are made<<<

Interesting, Murrayjennex. Thank you for clarifying that. I think the direction you are positing still includes the risk of devolving into a focus on the technology used for capture (and tagging and search), which treats knowledge as a stock. This ignores the part about facilitating the conversation, which treats knowledge as a flow.

I still contend that the more important part of KM has been and always will be the latter, knowledge as a flow. Knowledge-based companies don’t worry about their databases blowing up, they worry about their knowledge workers leaving, and losing the most valuable knowledge a knowledge-based company has - the tacit knowledge locked inside the knowledge workers’ heads. This includes their skills and expertise, yes, and also their network of relationships inside and outside the firm, their life experience, their attitudes and aptitude’s as Doug points out, etc, etc. - all tacit stuff that cannot be catalogued or explicated, because no one knows what they know (in totality) until they know it.

To me, harnessing this stuff going forward is where the real gold lies in terms of KM. To the degree that interest in KM is fading, maybe it’s because we’ve taken the knowledge-as-a-stock approach about as far as it can go, and the big advances and attendant benefits from doing that have been reaped. Maybe companies sense that, and are now beginning to question whether the incremental upside of continued focus in capture/collect/tag/store is worth the investment.