It goes without saying the technology has transformed internal communication in recent years. Getting to grips with Email, Ezine, Blogging let alone the rigours of HTML can swallow whole weeks without much attention on the real job at hand.

Such progress in the IT aspects of internal communication has been Knowledge Management (KM).  Capturing the corporate capability by persuading all staff to share their knowledge and
make it freely available to all their colleagues sounds like the Holy Grail. No longer does knowledge workout at 5:30pm along with employees... goodwill. Now we start each day and each job a little bit further ahead than ever before because the organisation can learn
along with the individuals...

Without an effective IT system you have an unmanageable mass of
data. Data in an uncontrollable format does not become information and so can not become useful as knowledge But cracking the IT code is not the only issue. I was talking with a KM expert only today who said

'The fact is that many companies either do not see the necessity
to leverage on the knowledge that is already in their company or do not see the value in making it accessible to everybody. Many consider KM is about installing software. Get the right software and everything will just turn out fine. It is easy to the Board to forget the need to change peoples approach to the whole retaining and sharing knowledge game. If they purely go down the software route it will not work and the business will get nothing back and then KM gets the blame...'


The software is just one small piece of the KM jigsaw in my opinion. What is yours?