I led a discussion of taxonomies and folksonomies in a Social Network Analysis Symposium at the 9th annual Braintrust Knowledge Management Summit last week. Participants included information technologists from the United States Army, Boeing, Pfizer, the IRS, Home Depot and Unisys. Knowledge management is sort of the inverse of learning management, comparable perhaps to institutional repositories in higher education. It was reassuring to know that these huge organizations were grappling with the same sorts of problems as small liberal arts colleges, how to capture the intellectual output and “transfer” that knowledge (i.e. teach).
The functional requirements for “managing” knowledge in organizations are very similar to those for “managing” courses in higher education. Knowledge about how a corporation produces its products and/or services needs to be captured so that it can be refined and reused in the same way that courses offered in higher education (the primary service provided by colleges and universities) need to be captured so they can refined and reused.Of course knowledge is useful only to the extent that is can be “transferred” to others in the organization in the same way that courses are useful to the extent that they can “teach” students. The irony of knowledge management that many large corporations are discovering is that it seems to be more successful when it is less “managed.” That is to say, when individual employees take initiative to share what they know with their peers and colleagues and form communities of practice with little directive from supervisors and managers. Many corporations described wiki and blogging initiatives that started as experiments and have grown to become valuable knowledge resources. The key to this success, many noted, was to provide employees with tools they could use to express themselves as individuals within a community of peers…