Dave Pollard recently summed up very well our own thinking about where so-called Knowledge Management is going:

""From content to connectivity, with social networking applications and expertise-finding and community-building processes taking over in priority from the populating and management of massive, just-in-case, context free repositories of documents, and

From corporate content management to personal content management, with simple, intuitive tools, personalized processes and one-on-one personal effectiveness training taking over in priority from complex, one-size-fits-all intranet tools, portals, 'productivity' software, and undifferentiated training"

Fellow Canadian blogger Robert Paterson agrees, and goes on to talk about an historical example of the whaling town, New Bedford, which "organized itself deliberately as a series of interlocking communities of practice" to manage their difficult and resource-intensive work:

"In the New Bedford model the system worked to deliver the best for the unit and the group. Each sailor had his entire community both onshore and afloat working to help him be successful. Every unit whether it be New Bedford or a ship or an investor had every individual working for their benefit. The mechanism was to share information within the boundary of the unit communities. Within the ships, within the fleet and within New Bedford.

So what if a bank saw itself like this? What if a hospital saw itself like this? What if a province saw itself like this?"

This is a good question, but whilst banks undoubtedly need these ideas, it is hospitals and provinces that concern us most.

We were part of a team that ran a "blended" knowledge sharing initiative within the NHS Modernisation Agency involving a group weblog, an online seminar and a highly interactive event at the Globe theatre in London. The feedback came in today and it was excellent, precisely because it was about stimulating connections, not just managing content, and trying to stimulate social knowledge sharing among improvement leaders. This is something that needs to be done regardless of organisational changes in the NHS.