Knowledge Management - a dying discipline?

KMWorld06 just held recently in San Jose featured Knowledge Management, Content Management and Intranets. A key theme running through the conference was the death of KM as we originally know it. But it is still an important initiative for an organisation - it's just that it needs to be renamed in order to gain traction with sponsors and users and for stakeholders to see the potential benefits.

Also in order for the conference to maintain some momentum and size, it was combined with conferences on Collaboration and Intranets. This seems like a sensible marriage since a key goal of KM is successful collaboration and shared used of organisational knowledge. Intranets provide just one way of developing the IT infrastructure to support them.

Web 2.0 and the new social networking tools like Blogs and Wikis were also popular. These new tools free users from the shackles of rigid IT structure and allow a greater freedom of speech (a mixed blessing some company execs might argue). But Wikis can support a much more free mode of collaboration and joint authoring, moving from autocratic authoring to democratic authoring.