Avoid the Ivory Tower and Stay Practical

I was interviewed by IT Business Edge a couple of weeks ago. It’s a great little weekly newsletter for IT professionals. One of the questions they asked me was, “Do you have any KM horror stories you’d care to share with us?” I had more than one to chose from, but chose to highlight the following:

I saw one life sciences company where there was a very serious investment in KM. After all, their knowledge capital is all they’ve got. They started with best practices (something called the Dublin Core) which is a pretty good set of metadata tags. But whereas most companies cull that list down 50 percent, they doubled it! So you had to go through this arduous task of entering 30 name-value pairs before you could upload a document. Instead of more sharing they got the opposite. Nobody shared.