The First Day: What IS Knowledge Management?

Welcome to my blog on my experience with Knowledge Management! I'm not sure about most students, but the extent of my Knowledge Management experience is very limited. It doesn't really go beyond Facebook and another blog I have written for when I was traveling. So when I showed up at the first day of class I wasn't really sure what to expect. I wasn't even really sure what "Knowledge Management" was. From my understanding of the first class and the couple of readings that were assigned, KM is anything we do to harness intellectual property in order to use, re-use, access, and realize it. The intellectual property can range anywhere from organizational culture to processes on dealing with clients, to actual data on products. My feeling is that companies would not be so successful today if they didn't use some kind of KM already, no matter how primitive. So my question is, would a pencil and paper be one of the most primitive forms of KM? Would your doctor's hand-written file on your yearly visits be considered KM? And if we can figure out what the primitive versions of KM are, can we better create technologically advanced KM that won't waste billions of dollars on functions with no promise like Adrian Ward suggests?

A bit unrelated to what we discussed in class but a really fun article to read, is an article I found on the NYTimes website:

"Brave New World of Digital Intimacy - I'm So Totally, Digitally Close to You"

I think this article really shows how not only the corporate world is using KM, but how also our generation is becoming dependent on it to define us. If all of this stuff is defining the generation, then I have no doubts that it will work itself into the corporate culture. It's just a matter of time... and getting the generations above us to understand/ utilize its greatness.