Trends in collaborative technologies for supporting knowledge management

Summary form only given. The last couple years have seen the emergence of a range of extremely light-weight, robust, and virtually free technologies that suggest that the knowledge management logjam may finally be breaking up. We have long experienced the challenges of using technology to support the effective retention of and access to information and knowledge in organizations. It is a concern even in industries such as aerospace that practice considerable formal archiving. Decades of research into knowledge engineering and other approaches, and experiences with Lotus Notes and other products, have not solved the problems. Much information is not recorded or maintained, and people can't or don't create useful metadata or more extensive contextual information that would enable it to be accessed and interpreted. Features of Web-based phenomena primarily used by young people today, such as blogging and tagging, are likely to move into organizations with as much impact as email and word processing twenty years ago, and spread much more rapidly. This presentation describes and illustrates these technologies in some detail, and suggests how enterprise use may evolve, in some cases based on successful small-scale trials.