In my wanderings about the Web, I encountered Luis Suarez’s thoughts on an article discussing IBM’s rethinking of knowledge management. In part, the Knowledge Sharing issue makes me think of internal corporate wikis, where people tend to put things up according to the mythical beast named, “When I have the time,” and whose pages can often become out of date, forgotten, and not maintained. However, at times I have thought that part of this problem is the nature of the wiki itself.

As someone who’s spent a good portion of her life mastering word processors and being able to use them to get things to look exactly as she wants them, I tend to find wikis to be a rather cumbersome and frustrating experience. I’m a technical person by nature, so it’s not that I don’t understand how to use them, but by definition wikis seem to be very bare bones and don’t even have some of the useful formatting features that even most blog-posting software has. Trying to get a non-technical person to utilize a wiki can be a frustrating experience, which tends to in a lot of ways sabotage the wiki’s usefulness if you want everyone to add to it.

Perhaps we’re entering the next step of evolution of the wiki, where it steps up from a raw format-coding platform to something more usable for the broader population and less self-facing (where much of what’s on a wiki is links to other locations on the wiki). IBM’s approach sounds much more blended, taking features from various social networking mechanisms and putting them together to make them more powerful and useful than they are separately. Hopefully more useful as well.

Ultimately, this Knowledge Sharing approach can only work well if it’s well-integrated into the daily work process to encourage adding to it, and its components share amongst themselves so that when you’re looking for something that you’re sure someone in the company knows, you can find it no matter where you start looking from. I suppose a certain level, then, of “knowledge management” would have to remain, though it might morph more into knowledge organization, a specialist who focuses on finding the best tools, guiding their integration, and watching how people use them and seeing how to enhance them.

Just a ramble inspired by an interesting set of posts. Ultimately, anything that increases communication effectiveness is IMO a good thing.