Some time back, an executive from an ECM company told me that Knowledge Management (KM) just never really panned out.  My response was "Sure it did.  We just call it social networking now."  After all, a major component of KM includes bringing peers together to share knowledge and content around an area of common interest.  Social networks are thriving both on  the Web and within companies around the world.  The whole point of social networking is to add value to the others in the network through the thoughtful sharing of ideas and content such as lessons learned.  That sounds a lot like what we used to call KM.

For example, John Mancini and AIIM International have just recently released a new eBook titled 8 reasons you need a strategy for managing information before its too late .  It's an interesting book for a number of reasons:

• Each  chapter of the book started out as a blog entry submitted by a guest author willing to share his or her experiences with others and thus make it available for peer review
• All contributors share an interest in one or more aspects of information management (ECM, KM, Taxonomy, etc.)
• All of the contributors belong to a common social network, AIIM, and follow John's blog, the Digital Landfill
• I'm one of the authors (shameless plug)

The point is, John and the folks at AIIM created a pretty nice way for peers to collaborate and share ideas.  AIIM members, as a social network of sorts, can challenge and add to the body of knowlege that has been submitted thereby improving the knowledge base.  The Digital Landfill blog provides the technology to enable the collaboration just as tools like SharePoint do in companies around the globe.

I've been fortunate to be involved in a number of KM deployments in my career.  Most of that work has been in the energy industry which has found ways to make KM work quite well and achieve very strong returns on investment.  Creating social networks (some companies call them Centers of Excellence or Communities of Practice) once took a lot of time and effort.  Thanks to tools like SharePoint, social networks are springing up all the time.  Some of the largest companies in the world are now using SharePoint for global KM initiatives.  The challenge many companies face with SharePoint is the increasing number of silos of knowledge.  The trick is to encourage the collaboration and social networking while creating a common framework that enables networks of networks for true, global knowledge sharing.  For that, you need an information architecture.  That's a plug...read the book.  And not just my bit.  There's a lot of great information in there.  I think you'll like it.

Best,
Michael