Hi everyone: I was interested in getting your opinion on what you consider to be the top 3-5 KM platforms for traditional KM activities. I welcome your thoughts based on your experiences. Thanks. Jay Liebowitz

Jay Liebowitz, D.Sc.
Visiting Professor and MSBA Program Co-Director
Seton Hall University

--

Jay,

--

I tend to agree with Jay wrt technology as an enabler.
My primary experiece is with Microsoft SharePoint and Yammer. Although one can do very much with SP as it is a development platform, it all falls flat if the Term Store for both controlled vocabularies or entrerprise keywords are not maintained, when content is not harvested & curated and when the organisation does not dedicate budget or KM human resources to KM solutions like dedicated portals, indexes, lists and catalogues.
Another key skill required on the IT side is proper use of the search engine aʼnd search queries to leverage the power of search, e.g. to exclude certain content from results oŕ to harness the synonyms, acronyms & abbreviations that can be included in the Term Store.

So for traditional KM activities I'm going to take learning from experience, innovation, knowledge sharing and applying best practice (we all know what we mean - I find the contesting of that term tiresome). Straight away I'm going to YouTube and Wikipedia for knowledge sharing.

I'm esp impressed how YouTube has engaged the discretionary effort of so many people to voluntarily record and share their know how about the widest range of topics. There's something to learn from that, altho most of us work at a smaller scale than global and these ideas don't always catch up below internet-size.

For three of the four, learning, innovation and applying, I'm going to say the biggest platforms are time (free time, slack), budget, relaxed boundaries and bringing people together. So often I think time and budgets and where people have to be, what they have to be doing and how they're supposed to be doing are so constrained that all but the essential aspects of these elements are driven out: we're 100% in 'exploit' mode with little scope for 'explore', which is what these things need.

I think the whole world of standards and professional bodies has contributed a great deal to best practices, but I say that with caution because whilst some are evidence-based, some are just opinions writ large. Again, global platforms that we can learn from and somewhat emulate at smaller scale.

The big platforms I focus on are projects (first and foremost - but there again I've overwhelmingly worked in project-based environments), business processes, the management process, policies (in so far as they have an actual effect and are not just words), roles & skills, and, of course subject matter content and esp information: I'm pretty clear that KM is not the same as IM and equally clear that in KM we use IM/document management as a key platform.

If, on the other hand, your question was about what would more help the knowledge manager themself ... well, that was a closing thought that I haven't concluded on yet!

Thank you everyone for your helpful replies. Wishing you all well. Best regards. Jay

At an Enterprise 2.0 conference, I was introduced to Andrew McAfee who was teaching at Harvard Business School at the time. He said when he asked his MBA classes if any of them had seen an effective knowledge management system, the consultants from BCG raised their hands. I helped create that system - the first, second, third+ iterations of it. It was a relational database with a few template pages and a search engine. We did it inexpensively leveraging existing software licenses and the company continues to benefit from that foundation.