Mopsos

Reflecting later upon the Personal KM workshop at KM Europe, maybe the transportation industry could be a good metaphor for KM.

In the early days of the industrial revolution, the railway was the only industrial transportation system, and of course, it belonged to railway companies, each one having its own infrastructure standards, and thus could not interoperate. There was nothing personal there. And that's how early KM systems were: one size fits all, company-owned and proprietary. Then cars, busses and motorcycles were invented, and they adopted a very simple international infrastructure standard: the paved road and the tire, basically (aka messenging + http protocols, RSS/XML etc.). Some of these vehicles were personal bicycles, motorcycles, or cars (aka e-mail, IM, Mindmapping, Weblogs), some were leased like taxis (aka ASPs), and some were collective busses or coaches (aka collaborative spaces). The road became diverse too, so there came a need for rules and signs(aka metadata). Four lane highways were built and maintained at the national level (aka corporate glossaries, thesauri, ontologies), others like streets at the community level
(aka community taxonomies) and other like driveways at the personal level (aka categories + files). And then came the airlines (aka Wifi), but let's keep it simple. The point is that nowadays, if you want to go from one place to another, you can choose your personal car, the train or the bus and, whatever vehicle you choose can take you there using a wide variety of road systems, although the user experience varies tremendously.

This is to show that the one-size-fits-all of corporate KM is no longer the rule of the knowledge sharing game. Personal tools can indeed blend quite nicely with corporate tools, as long as they do complement each other. It also shows that interoperability standards don't need to be very complicated to work.

This metaphor of course needs to be worked on. This is very messy.

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