How is this for a conclusion to an article on KM?
Organizations need to remember that knowledge creation is first a personal activity. Knowledge is assembled internally by individuals. Knowledge contributes to the building up of the value of the person, the worker, in whom it is embodied. Protecting growing expertise, nurturing it, encouraging it and exposing that expertise to others who will benefit is the ultimate knowledge management activity.
This comes from KM as a Framework for Managing Knowledge Assets from Lynda Moulton and The Gilbane Report (which has a blog).
I used this article as a way to motivate some discussion around content management in my KM class this evening, and it created a great set of conversations. Some people really liked the reality check nature of the article in that knowledge management starts long before a content management system is put into place. You need to understand culture, processes and the value chain before building a system to support it. Others liked the discussion of the logical steps that one needs to follow to start a knowledge audit and understand how knowledge and "knowledge tokens" are used within an organization.
I liked a variety of aspects of the article. It seems to fit very well with my thinking about knowledge management with statements like, "The hardest part of knowledge management is managing the people at all points in the lifecycle of each knowledge asset." Or, that technology "won't replace the human knowledge processes from which content originates."
Spawning out of this discussion and discussion of content management in general, we landed in (another) discussion of the nature of knowledge that had us jumping through several other ideas. The students were stretching some of my knowledge as well, which is a wonderful thing.
[Originally found through elearningpost, I think.]