I suspect there are numerous companies that are using weblog tools as the basis for knowledge content management. This is a sign that a foothold on the shear face of corporate knowledge management challenges has been established.

One of the challenges of using weblog tools in a corporate environment is seamless integration with pre-existing portal platforms - not just the content, but the security context. Blog tools have been designed for free and open expression, but corporate information systems - especially those that leverage the public Internet - must be secure.

Weblog tools in a business setting must also provide lots of publish-subscribe options that optimize the reader's ability to gain an awareness without reading everything.

• What the heck is knowledge management?– Knowledge management can be seen as the sum of online collaboration, content management and communication among a specific community. That’s the only way I could get my sister to understand what KM is (she is a nurse!).
• Knowledge accuracy cannot often be validated by other parties than the contributors themselves.
• Portal server software such as IBM Websphere, Metadot Portal Server, iPlanet and Sharepoint should provide a way to provide smart push technology (as opposed to the defunct old one!)
• Metadot Portal Server does provide smart push capabilities by letting users choose the frequency of notification – that’s the communication piece of the equation!
• Knowledge management programs are difficult to implement with a top-down approach but corporations need to put in place the technology and services to enable to do knowledge management as the workers works (i.e. real-time)
• Is a blogger like MySmartChannels a KM system?

Scenario:

1. A manager reviews business reports and notes important trends;
2. The trend that she has observed is composed as a channel item;
3. The channel item exists in a specific domain of expertise (that being the analyst making the observation about the report content);
4. The observation is immediately dispatched to upper management as a secure news feed item;
5. On the desktops of all upper managers the item is displayed in the Metadot portal.

The benefits:

• Business domain experts are provided a secure (yet distributed) framework for creating rich content and notations about business operations;
• The content creation process is seamless to the reporting process;
• The notations are naturally classified in specific knowledge-domains;
• The expert notations are delivered in real-time to business managers and other employees that can benefit;
• The notations and other analytical content can be utilized in many desktop tools including the Metadot portal, e-mail, and notification tools.

This is my short list - if you have others, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

• Knowledge-workers must be able to bring about an awareness of important, relevant, and potentially urgent business content in a friction-free process.
• The knowledge-content must be persisted in a manner that recognizes natural life-cycles, accessibility through common standards and the propensity for change. 
• Content items must be managed associatively ( i.e., they must exist in an ontology based on domains of expertise). 
• Knowledge-workers must be able to easily identify (and subscribe to) information that is important and urgent.
• The knowledge-content management framework must provide publish-subscribe capabilities across a collection of platforms both static and mobile.
• Knowledge-content must be captured and managed in a framework that supports distributed information architectures designed to outlive their initial intentions.

On a daily basis almost every knowledge-worker reads news and other sources of business content and then creates comments and observations that other business associates, colleagues, customers, and vendors consume. The usual and customary method for creating annotations and observations is by e-mail. I have nothing against e-mail - in fact - my philosophical perspective is that SMTP and e-mail processes represent valuable collaboration tools for enterprises that cannot be discarded, but may certainly be optimized. However, the place where e-mail content comes to rest is problematic - e-mail is where knowledge goes to die.

Portals (such as Metadot) are the primary delivery source of news feeds. Imagine a portal component that allows users to create annotations that tie one or more news or other information items together with annotation text. Further imagine that the annotations are stored in a knowledge channel that can then be consumed in many ways – such as in a weblog, a report, an e-mail, or as an RSS news feed item. In most companies annotations and observations are typically created in e-mail with some messagestaining links that point out to specific information objects relevant to the message. Aside from the message itself, the knowledge dies a slow death in the inbox of office workers and executives. Creating a process so that annotations and business observations may live as uniquely addressable information objects, clearly has greater advantages; especially for portal users.

Here's a scenario that might help organizations and teams transform information into reusable knowledge.

1. The knowledge-worker uses a simple “annotate” button that has been integrated into news and other content feeds in Metadot.
2. When a user selects an annotate button, MySmartChannels responds by displaying a dialog with entry fields for title, synopsis, etc. The user is free to enter observations and notes about the content item.
3. The dialog automatically adds a link to the content that was selected to annotate. Multiple content items may be annotated under one channel item and multiple links are added dynamically to the open channel item dialog.
4. Once the annotation is entered into a channel, it is available for consumption through many processes and knowledge-discovery tools. Additionally, the annotations are secure.

The benefits:

• Complex annotations – users may browse and assimilate items from multiple reports to create a single annotation that connects all report end-points;
• Annotation templates - templates provide advanced classification, consistency of annotation items, and greater annotation productivity;
• Annotation viewing – annotations may be presented in Web pages, news feeds, portals, and other applications.
• Expertise domains - annotations can be associated with other types of information objects;
• Annotation syndication – annotation content may be used in a syndicated form through native RSS;
• XML and RSS – flexible consumption support for all annotation content;
• Publish-subscribe – integrated publish, sharing, and subscription services;
• Microsoft Office – automatic linking to annotations from Microsoft Office XP documents.

In my humble opinion, this sounds like a more meaningful approach than e-mailing everything and everyone.

 Let me know how you feel...

I envision an enterprise portal with features similar to a personal weblogging tool that serves as a file-system in the sky. Imagine blog-like processes that:

• ...accept documents;
• ...categorize pictures;
• ...manage personal and corporate links;
• ...represent domain specific silos of knowledge;
• ...include instant messaging conversations;
• ...seamlessly capture outgoing and incoming e-mail;

Content agility seems to be related to two basic principles - a services oriented architecture, and the ability to address changes in information requirements that we cannot anticipate. Achieving this is alot easier than it might look, however, there are ways to get close to such a solution. One place to start is to focus on the principles of agility, and specifically, this one:

"Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility."

Convergence of weblogs and portals will also require common interfaces, but there are some basics that we need to focus on as we create an agile design.

• Many-to-many knowledge sharing framework
• Real-time business annotation and secure weblog system
• Ad-hoc knowledge aggregation
• Low friction publish/subscribe environment
• Flexible integration possibilities
  • SOAP, Klips, RSS feeds, Smart Tags, e-Mail, HTTP
• Componentized architecture
• Robust permissions model