Is Tacit Knowledge Finally Within Reach...?

Jon Husband usually has a lot of great things to say in his blog and recently posted a retrospective on KM that found its way into the FASTForward Blog -- another great regular read.

In this particular post, Jon makes a couple of great points regarding the ongoing struggle firms have in wrestling value from their attempts to harness their own explict and (if they're astute and somewhat lucky) tacit knowledge.

Like its "similarly-technosophical-sibling", Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Knowledge Management (KM) remains an elusive ideal for most companies outside service-oriented firms -- who depend on their ability to differentiate and monetize their tacit knowledge's IP-value.  And while Web 2.0 offers many rich capabilities (e.g., blogs, wikis, presence-based messaging, forums, profiles) that didn't exist in the early days of KM...the ideal of a "knowledge worker environment" is still far from reality in most companies who seek it.

Jon summarizes many of the truisms that were oft-held axims for companies traversing the KM-bridge on their journey to Canaan and the "land of the knowledge worker".  Establishing an organizational discipline reliant on cobbling process structure around often disparate applications was no small feat in the early 90's and remains so today.

But some of Jon's summary headlines got me thinking about the potential offered by the evolving capability of social-software solutions we're seeing within mainstream, and white-label, enterprise applications.

Particularly:

• "How to create a knowledge sharing culture?"...not being the right question versus "asking and understanding what...can (be done) to encourage and facilitate connections...to help...appropriate info and knowledge be available when and where it is most needed..."

• "Knowledge transfer is self-assembling and self-organizing...it is done by humans in interaction..."

• ???Physical??? knowledge...accessed and used in organizations is better thought of as a dependency relationship of...processes on...objects which underpin the social construction of just-in-time knowledge..."

Socialtext recently announced a particularly nice application with their new "Socialtext Dashboard" that blends usability, social computing capability and the true potential of "tacit knowledge capture" rather nicely -- and speaks directly to some of Jon's headlines.

(Now I'll first beg allowances from the Socialtext folks for blending several of their product screenshots to illustrate the "A-Ha" value prop I believe their newest app truly offers.)

Those who regularly read this blog already know its fundamental tenet is that business applications themselves should, by design, support human interaction as embedded elements of hte process they automate.

But we already see a fundamental truism of organizational interaction in the explosive "communal hub" growth offered by many of the mainstream, social hubs (i.e., Facebook, Linked-In, Plaxo, OpenBC) -- we are social creatures who seek connection with those similarly like-minded.

Socialtext's Dashboard, though seemingly 1.0 in its level of "enterprise-finish-and-function", offers a fanstastic capability that is natively missing in the mainstream, social hubs -- and notably absent in any enterprise offering I know of -- to automate following of tacit knowledge recorded by like-minded peers.

With their new dashboard, users have the capability to name individuals that blog and contextually consolidate all feeds within their own profile homepage.  I do this too with RSS -- but have only been able to build a nice repository in my iGoogle homepage over time and serious exploration.  Imagine if I had been auto-directed to individuals whose expertise was meaningful for my day job...in addition to those who I discovered in my own happenstance exploration!

If we had this capability "by-design" in more enterprise and white-label software suites, we'd certainly have a leg-up on realizing the benefit of some of Jon's insightful axims from yesteryear's KM headlines.