CIOs haven’t given up on its promise. Knowledge management has long suffered a bad rap as a sexy technology that falls short on delivering business value. But for two years in a row, KM has ranked a respectable 7th on our list of critical technologies. (Twenty-one technologies were ranked on this list in 2005.) This is happening in part because many of the technologies that fall under the aegis of KM have come into their own: collaboration tools, corporate portals, content management and business intelligence.
These technologies aren’t mere repositories for knowledge, as earlier KM systems tended to be. They route knowledge to the people who need it, or embed what the company has learned into a process. As companies find these knowledge-managing technologies helpful, they’ll look for new, effective ways to manage corporate know-how and put it to work.
