Excellent summary of the benefits of KM from blogs – Joho the Blog: Blogging in Germany:
“I continue to believe that for many companies the best path to blogging is by using them internally as a knowledge management tool. The dream of KM has been that people will write down what they know. KM regimes, however, have assumed they would have to discipline people into doing that. Blogs entice people to write down what they know and to share it widely. A project blog or a department blog not only surfaces and shares knowledge, it also makes it searchable and archives it. …”
I saw this post reading Jay Cross on the Learning Circuits blog, and he commented:
“Doesn’t this make more sense than paying consultants to install some humongous KM system that nobody uses? Shouldn’t we be capturing the know-how of front-line workers who actually know how? Why aren’t more organizations getting on board with this?”
Well, the answers in the question – there’s not enough money in it for the army-of-consultants-big-companies that lot’s of organisations have outsourced their expertise to…
Anyway, some smart companies are (e.g. one of my clients :-) – it definitely takes an internal evangelist, though – if it wasn’t for him, the initial scepticism wouldn’t have been overcome…it literally took months of ‘jfdi’ on his and the team’s part, to keep blogging about their activities to get recognition of the KM benefits and potential.