KM is Dead! Long Live KM!

This is a theme I have and will be touching on over the months and years. In a conversation to myself the other day - I'm a Gemini (not CapGemini) - I asked myself, "hey, isn't Knowledge Management dead already? Dave Snowden seemed to think so in 2007 at that salty talk in California!" And didn't I just leave the U.S. Government Agency ranked #1 (it is currently 0900 hours) in KM and Leadership, where I (supposedly) was paving the way for KM? And, hey, wait-a-dang-minute! -I- just got elected Co-Chair for the Knowledge Management Working Group in 2008! So that MUST mean that KM is alive and well, right??

Well, right now things are on hold a bit as I transition to my new position as a full-time tenure-track faculty member of Marymount University's School of Business. Although Jeanne Holm, the other Co-Chair, working at NASA, is doing a lot of things that Jeanne Holm does. I'm sure whatever it is, it will BLOW YOUR MIND. According to her Facebook page, she is right now, "looking at using virtual worlds for social issues." Hmm. Sounds expensive, but cool.

So today, my feeling about KM is that it is really a mishmash of some organizational behavior models and development practices... with a little flair. Enabled, of course, by information technology. I'm mean. Ch'yuah. You would have to have been social networking under a rock over the past few years not to know what I'm talking about.

Throw in a little corporate university, lessons learned programs, maybe a community-of-practice or a thousand, and you have it: a full-fledged, top-notch, rinky-dinky, Twenty-First Century* KM Suite! Or System. Or Program. Or Office. Or whatever. Just call it KM, and you'll get to look at all the cool sites.

So that is what my definition of KM is this morning: an ongoing conversation about the most compelling technologies, practices and insights for learning from one another that are changing our world. And it is definitely time for a change in the way we share knowledge across the Federal space. Or private space. Or just: share.

* Recognizing that by the time the 20th was at this stage, in 1908, the first fatal air crash occurred on September 17. Orville Wright was flying a plane that crashed, killing poor S.C. Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, his passenger. If one parallels or conflates the importance of the airline industry with KM, you can see clearly that by the time you are on your thirteenth bio-copied kidney, KM will be a mature industry.