Dave Pollard discusses a Dave Snowden article in Dave Snowden on Knowledge Management. What interests me is the juxtaposition between my belief in what they are saying and what I hear business requesting.
One of my peers in the badly-named discipline of Knowledge Management is IBM's complexity guru, Dave Snowden. Last year Dave wrote a paper entitled Managing for Serendipity, which I really enjoyed. Dave appears to share my disdain for the context-free capture and 'codification' of people's business knowledge in massive 'knowledge bases' just in case someone else might be able to benefit from that knowledge sometime in the future (assuming they can find it).
Codification of knowledge is not going to be terribly helpful to the knowledge creation process. And it isn't much good unless connected with some darned good processes around managing the stuff that you've codified (knowledge, information, content). In some areas of business, the leaders don't want their people innovating and creating new knowledge. Presumably, well-delivered and relevant content is sufficient.
Then again, these people still tend to talk and learn from one another and teach each other better ways to work. Why not develop the underlying business structure to support these kinds of activities and encourage everyone to raise the baseline for the whole group.