Dave Pollard has posted a useful perspective on knowledge management and its relationship to IT entitled WHAT GOOD IS IT?

He starts by stating the obvious fact that both IT and KM suffer from unfulfilled expectations and also a focus on the organisational rather than the personal issues, which mean both tend to move towards the lowest common denominator tasks required by lawyers and accountants such as regulatory issues and form-filling.

He goes on to say that by addressing instead individual effectiveness using small, simple individual knowledge sharing tools, KM and IT together could recover some of their lost ground.

By working together to create 'TechKnowledgy' applications he think sKM and IT can achieve some easy wins, such as:

• Locating and Connecting to People with Expertise

• Reducing the Need for Travel

• Enabling Multi-Tasking

• Automating the Purchase and Sale of Commodities
  

Common sense stuff, but worth considering for any organisations who see KM as another form of enterprise software. As many of us have learned already, KM should focus on lightweight enabling and underpinning infrastructure that is concerned with connecting people in new and meaningful ways, rather than on trying to build generic "knowledge stock" for a large organisation.