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tend to put things up according to the mythical beast named, “When I have the time,” and whose pages can often become out of date, forgotten, and not maintained.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.

Knowledge management is one of those strange terms that sounds like it was made up to make someone’s job sound more important than it is. However, the task of the knowledge manager is no small one: “capture” the knowledge within a company, whether across the board or in a vertical section such as human resources or technology usage. This process is multi-step, as you have to get a feeling for what there is to learn, who to go to in order to learn it, and then get it all down in ways that people can find and make use of.

In my case, I capture best practices in using the Splunk product to accomplish key tasks. Since I’m surrounded by experts in various aspects of using Splunk at work, this task involves a bit of mind-melding so I can learn and understand cool things that other Splunkers have discovered and then put them down in a way our users can follow. I’m sure that many users out there who have come up with some pretty interesting ways to efficiently utilize Splunk for their own purposes. If you’re one of them, I’d love to hear what you’re up to!