Knowledge Management

Organizations are burdened with channeling knowledge and ideas in the form of training and learning to employees more rapidly, more effectively, and in an even more efficient manner than ever. In an effort to meet these objectives, organizations are seeking to consolidate disparate knowledge and learning technologies into a centralized point of access and management, while leveraging existing investments (legacy systems, resources, etc.) in enterprise infrastructure in order to provide employees with simple, seamless access to knowledge, training and learning.

The new economy is fueled by knowledge. Organizations possess incredible intellectual capital. The challenge has been, and continues to be, providing access to that capital and assembling it for development of best practices and collective learning. Once defined marketplaces are melding into one global marketplace. Human capital is now an asset to be scrupulously managed. Learning is a strategic advantage and weapon. Workforce supply is in flux - everyone's a free agent. The world is in a state of rapid-growth and hyper-efficiency - and its all beginning to blur at Internet speed. The critical and differentiating force of countries, organizations, and individuals lies in their knowledge and intelligence and how they use it in the new knowledge economy.

Succinctly put, Knowledge Management (KM) is the process through which organizations generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets. Most often, generating value from such assets involves sharing them among employees, departments and even with other companies in an effort to devise best practices. KM is the broad process of locating, organizing, transferring, and using the information and expertise within an organization.

Not all information is valuable. Therefore, it's up to individual companies to determine what information qualifies as intellectual and knowledge-based assets. In general, however, intellectual and knowledge-based assets fall into one of two categories: explicit or tacit. Included among the former are assets such as patents, trademarks, business plans, marketing research and customer lists. As a general rule of thumb, explicit knowledge consists of anything that can be documented, archived and codified, often with the help of IT. Much harder to grasp is the concept of tacit knowledge, or the know-how contained in people's heads. The challenge inherent with tacit knowledge is figuring out how to recognize, generate, share and manage it. While IT in the form of e-mail, groupware, instant messaging and related technologies can help facilitate the dissemination of tacit knowledge, identifying tacit knowledge in the first place is a major hurdle for most organizations.

While it may carry a different name in the future, knowledge management anchors one end of the eLearning continuum and is vital to improving organizational performance.

Portals

As organizations move their critical business functions online, a key to pulling together information in many different formats from many different databases and applications is the effective use of a portal. The Web portals enduring value has moved far beyond merely facilitating information to delivering services that connect people to content via integrated applications. One click of a mouse can now set off a whole series of activities, from authentication to credit checking to order processing to shipment-masses of transactions that are driven through the end-to-end e-business world.

For example, an insurance underwriter using a portal-based system can have all her key applications (company cases, manuals, claims forms, image files, etc.) available in one place. Pulling together relevant information and making it easily accessible gives her a full picture of policy coverage and claims history instantaneously. All of the time and effort she previously put into searching for the appropriate information and people she can now use to focus on her work. Major improvements in portal technology in the last 24 months, including integration software that links a portals users to an enterprises digital assets, give users a single, personalized point of access to multiple types of information from any device, wired or wireless. These advancements meet one of the primary goals of companies doing business on the Web-making relevant information easily accessible to employees, business partners and customers, while driving profits in the process.

A blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting) are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging which consists of blogs with very short posts. As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs.

Recently, researchers have analyzed the dynamics of how blogs become popular. There are essentially two measures of this: popularity through citations, as well as popularity through affiliation (i.e. blogroll). The basic conclusion from studies of the structure of blogs is that while it takes time for a blog to become popular through blogrolls, permalinks can boost popularity more quickly, and are perhaps more indicative of popularity and authority than blogrolls, since they denote that people are actually reading the blog's content and deem it valuable or noteworthy in specific cases.

The emergence of blogging has brought a range of legal liabilities and other often unforeseen consequences. One area of concern is the issue of bloggers releasing proprietary or confidential information. Another area of concern is blogging and defamation. A third area of concern is employees who write about aspects of their place of employment or their personal lives, and then face loss of employment or other adverse consequences. A number of examples of blogging and its sometimes negative or unforeseen consequences are cited.

Bloggers currently can sell ads through a keyword system such as Google's Adsense. If an individual writes a blog about asbestos lawsuits, he or she is bound to get significant traffic from lawyers. And that could lead to subscription models. Some bloggers may become so successful that they can charge for their output.

While most agree that blogging will continue to be popular, its next steps are uncertain. Some suggest that blogging overexposure is on the horizon. However, blogging is here to stay, as many sites start to incorporate blogging features, and some news sites become more blog-like. The blogosphere will also become known for topics other than technology and politics. Two things are certain: Blogging will remain disruptive to the traditional media, and new uses will surface as Blogging move to other media such as audio, video and instant messaging.