What Is Happening with KM? The Shift to Social Computing

4 thoughts on “What Is Happening with KM? The Shift to Social Computing”

  1. I liked this post, and the others you have written about the phenomenon of people self-organizing in teams rather than looking for guidance from a command-and-control superstructure. For the past few years I have been working on a new approach to collaboration within distributed teams that are self-organized, even viral in nature. I just started public beta testing of the software, and I would be happy to get your views on what we are doing. You can find out more at http://www.kerika.com. thanks, Arun

  2. Thanks a lot, Arun, for dropping by and welcome ! I really appreciate the feedback and would be more than happy to take a look into Kerika. I have just been going through the web site and it surely looks very very interesting. Thus I have now downloaded the beta client for Windows and over the next few days I will be trying it out and then I will create a new weblog post over here sharing my thoughts and views on the client itself. Thus stay tuned !

    Thanks again for the feedback !

  3. An excellent — and relevant — post. Especially for my job at Aelera.com.

    However, I want to balance your statement that “we should not fall into the same trap and identify that this shift is all about the tools themselves” by quoting my colleague Aw Kong Koy: “Without technology, there is little new in knowledge management.”

    BTW, the flickr Flash thingy gets in the way of typing comments at times!

    Phil

  4. Thanks, Phil, for the feedback comments and for the different links ! Quite interesting reads !

    Actually, Aw Kong Koy’s quote may be quite accurate actually, but there is no denying that Knowledge Management has already existed way before technology was there and seeing how things have developed over the last few years I tend to think that over focus on it has actually done a lot more harm than benefit the state of things in KM. I am sure that even if technology would not have been there KM would still have survived quite all right. In a different shape, perhaps, indeed, but it would still be alive and kicking. Why? More than anything else, and above all, because of the human factor, which is basically what is bringing back KM into play right at this moment with the social software push. That way more and more people are seeing the huge benefits from applying KM to their businesses (And why not? their own personal lives) and all and for the first time it looks like technology is not the primary focus, which is good.

    Nevertheless, and with all that said, I must say, indeed, the best thing would be to have a balance between the two in order to get the best out of both of them and not having to worry about why such and such KM initiative didn’t work. And somehow I feel, too, that this time around it may work. At least, social computing is trying out real hard and it may eventually pull it together.

    Regarding your feedback on the Flickr flash badge I am not sure what is that happening since I am not able to reproduce it. It may be perhaps an issue with your screen resolution not being very high and then getting in the way. I would appreciate if you could send me an e-mail with a screen shot of what it would look like to you and then from there I will have a look and see what I can do. Thanks for letting me know about this. Appreciated.

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