Attendance at the conference in Santa Clara was up this year and road traffic heavier, both signs of an improving economy, and a good sign for KM practitioners and vendors. The overall focus that permeated the sessions was defining business requirements, then determining the appropriate measure of ROI, with less emphasis on the technology than last year. There was a wider appreciation of the people factor as the major factor in successful implementation of enterprise knowledge management programs, and acknowledgement that business processes should be the driver, not technology. Successful KM management focuses on solving a major problem for the organization, and having upper management backing of solutions selected.

The opening keynote by Dave Snowden of Cynefin Centre "Decision-Making and Innovation: The Real Function of KM" set the tone for focusing on the human aspects, by using an analogy of trying to manage a birthday party for a group of 12 year old boys. As in this example, an ordered process doesn't work, but setting boundaries and context (football outside, not inside!) does work for human behavior, which by its very nature is not tidily ordered. Within an organization, human systems are complex since each person has multiple identities, and different cognitive matches, and will respond to their own version of cause and effect. Focusing on outcomes and intended results is a better strategy for the business to adapt to its environment, rather than attempting to maintain a stable, predictive environment which by its very nature fails to detect disruptive new patterns. Certainly this model is more applicable to analyzing behaviors being monitored for terrorist activity, than the standard process oriented approach!

Bottom-up KM was an underlying theme of several sessions which focused on using wikis and blogs in the corporate environment. Recognizing that "everyone hates to file", utilizing tools that capture information as it comes into being, rather than after the fact, is a powerful concept. Capturing and/or replacing the ubiquitous email with personal publishing tools improves timeliness and simultaneously builds the knowledge store of the enterprise. In contrast many of the vendors with complicated KM "solutions", there were some innovative approaches with more understandable and less technical approaches. Traction Software can be configured to capture incoming and outgoing email as an enterprise weblog, using skins to emulate Outlook email look and feel, and has been adopted in the government sector. Ross Mayfield of Socialtext passionately described the benefits of the enterprise wiki as a collaborative workgroup social software. Questions from the audience raised issues of controlling access and security of information--clues that while this particular software can be quite effective in a workgroup team environment, widespread adoption in enterprise wide applications will be slower. On the other hand, TechDirt, an accidental KM service provider, is in the business of providing outside competitive intelligence as an RSS feed to a company blog or wiki, allowing commentary within the organization on outside content, an attractive feature for strategy, sales and marketing. All these companies are providing simple, innovative and inexpensive tools, with complex benefits, making them attractive to risk aversive organizations.

Social networks were another underlying theme with different approaches to identifying experts and capturing their knowledge, with a range of solutions varying from simple to complex. Creating a culture of sharing is one of the major challenges of KM systems, and interestingly, a recent American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) study in several major companies found workers were reluctant to be identified as experts. Yet this expertise is highly valuable to the organization for staffing and problem-solving. An interesting approach to solving this problem was demonstrated by Morphix, whose software simply looks at the email sender, the email receiver and the subject line to identify relationships and communities of interest, both inside and outside the corporation. Simple, no additional work for the communicators, yet powerful!

The session on metadata and taxonomies had standing room only, an indication of the continuing need to organize the content. And on the exhibit floor,in addition to the tazonomy companies, every content management solution had some flavor of categorization, but understanding the benefits and drawbacks of each approach is not intuitively obvious! And now taxonomy is evolving into ontology--new terminology, which may or may not be appropriate for a given application.

On the exhibit floor, FAST and Entopia were the "big booths" at this year's conference, representing the emphasis on search technology at this show. These represent best of breed technologies, but must be integrated into other applications, a drawback in marketing to organizations which have mandated integrated suites for enterprise software.. The good news/bad news is that are lots of options, from up and coming Your Amigo at the low end to Verity and Autonomy at the high end, as well as expanding OEM relationships to provide integrated solutions.

The tracks at the KM World & Intranets 2004 conference provided plenty of options for attendees at various stages of implementation to learn from each other, as they explored solutions for various industries and government sectors. But the overriding message was that Knowledge Management is become much more enabling personal knowledge networks and discovery processes, and less managing content depositories.