Questions on KM

According to Laurie Orlov, an analyst from Forrester, KM is a broad term that frames a firm’s desire to do a better job in the creation, transfer, and codification of what employees, partners, and customers know.

Orlov argues that KM has become "Too broad to be meaningful, too encompassing for projects to be successful, and too subject to interpretation by vendors and consultants to be easily purchased, managed, or finished in anything less than a year".

She then recommends firms to aks themselves 6 specific questions. Does your firm need to do a better job of:

1. Sharing solutions to customer problems in a call center?
2. Helping groups or teams collaborate and share work?
3. Locate people with specific skills or create communities?
4. Managing unstructured content repositories?
5. Providing customized access to existing information?
6. Documenting, modeling and executing business processes?

Do you agree KM has become "Too broad to be meaningful" and can you think of another specific KM-question?

8 Intranet Trends

Shiv Singh, Portal Practice Lead at Avenue A/Razorfish answers the question of what you should be worrying about as an intranet manager. How can you create greater business value through your corporate intranet? Is your intranet going to be most impacted by a new technology, a new business idea or something else? Or is it all just about information retrieval?
1. Intranets return to the domain of the departments
2. The records management and the legal departments get involved
3. All employees become intranet publishers
4. The corporate telephone directory loses its luster
5. The new killer app -- the knowledge management tool
6. Real time information delivery becomes a priority
7. Information retrieval remains unsolved but there's hope
8. Employees demand a more aesthetic user experience

Singh wisely finishes by saying that 'There is never any magic answer to the question of where and how you should invest your intranet budget. Each organization is uniquely different and a variety of factors such as your organizational culture, your existing portfolio of applications and your business priorities drive those decisions. But keep these intranet trends in mind because irrespective of the nature of your business and the design of your current intranet, some of these trends are probably coming your way and you are going to need to respond to them'.
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