There has been a flurry of activity around 'standards' for knowledge management from Australia, Europe, England and most here in the US too.
This raises a number of key issues:
1) Is this a good time to be talking standards? Has the discipline matured sufficiently that we need to start looking at terminology, representations, inference, practices, exchanges between software tools?
2) What do we want to standardize? basic concepts, principles, methods and models.......
3) Which organization should be taking the lead here? ANSI, ISO, IEEE, W3, GKEC, KMCI, KMPro???
4) Who do we wish to involve in the discussion? Intellectual capitalists, knowledge ecologies & economists, tool vendors, consultants, government and industry, eLearning, CRM, ERP?
5) Will those who are standing to one side (KMCI) get caught up in all the rush and the excitement? or will we left as lone voices crying over spilt milk?
Have serious reservations about moving to standards in this area as it is early days, we are all experimenting, all still learning, software is evolving at a rate of knots and we struggle to bound our discourse & talk just the same language. Witness the ongoing conversations here and elsewhere on Km boards around "what is KM"? and "what does knowledge really mean"?.
Perhaps the most fruitful area will be developing shared terminology, trying to contain meaning creep and marketing hype. Some folks seem to be heading for wisdom management - surely a paradox if ever there was one!
Interoperability and standards are part of the proces of commoditizing a technology. So to say it is time to commoditize yourself is to say that the market has matured and there is little or no money left to be made from that market.
KM can hardly define itself or sell it's products, so there is absolutely no need to standardize.
Having a glossary would be great. I'm tired of fighting the definition wars.
Posted by: David Locke | February 02, 2004 at 04:18 AM