IBM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_x78XLBBVM

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I have been intrigued by IBM's success and by how they have been one of the early adopters of KM. What is even more interesting is how they are so vocal about its importance and their success. Isn't this a competitve advantage they are giving away? I recently attended a recruiting session for IBM and they listed their Web 2.0 KM tools as a large recruiting tool. One of the ways they explained their tools was in relating them to tools open to the general public in order for the company to feel small amongst its thousands of employees:

BlueTube - You Tube
Dogtagging - del.ico.ous
Wiki - Wikipedia
BluePages - Facebook/Yellow Pages

I also found other tools (more on the enterprise level) when researching a little bit about IBM. I guess we can all learn a lot about IBM's success. They have converted well-liked/used tools widely available to the public into internal tools just for their employees and created the largest intranet in the world. IBM has become successfull because they have basically created their own INTERNET! Imagine that? It is apparent that IBM has realized the power of knowledge and have even conquered social issues that our class as encountered (ex confidence in declaring oneself an "expert" in order to publish their knowledge) and has saved approximately 220,000 hours of practitioner time. No wonder they are bouncing back after their brief loss of market share in the 90's. And no wonder our class and practicaly all of the project's presented in class (including my own on CRM) are studying IBM as an example of success. My question now, is what are they concocting next?

Some articles I found interesting about IBM's success:

http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=16907&PageNum=1

http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/journal/sj/404/thomas.html