KnowledgeFarm

KnowledgeFarm.  Bottoms up knowledge management.  K-Logs….

>>>Knowledge management has been, up to now, largely a top-down enterprise. Driven by a concern that corporate knowledge repositories would quickly fill up with inaccurate, useless junk without rigid quality review, organizations have created small priesthoods of knowledge administrators responsible for virtually all authoring. Unfortunately, the result often has been massive bottlenecks as content generated in this centralized way sits for weeks or months awaiting review. By the time knowledge reaches its intended users, much of it has aged to the point of irrelevance.

Top-down knowledge management has had limited success. KM will begin to show significant ROIs when the process is inverted. Centralized knowledge administration clearly produces higher-value knowledge — but centralized authoring retards growth. In the coming decade, the hard dollar value of knowledge will be recognized, and everyone — not just a small elite — will be responsible for generating the raw materials for corporate KM.

Bottom-up knowledge generation will have significant impacts on the way work, and workers, are perceived by corporations. Management will have to develop new incentives for knowledge workers to contribute high-quality content. For more traditional firms now adopting KM practices, decentralization of knowledge generation will be difficult, as it is antithetical to some ingrained management principles and habits.<<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

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