Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow

CHAPTER 9

Knowledge Flow Management: The Next Generation

It’s tough making predictions, especially about the future.

—Robert Storm Petersen, 1884, Danish writer and cartoonist

 

What will knowledge sharing look like over the coming decade? Will more companies make the step from looking at it primarily as a technical topic to a more holistic discipline? Will they make the step from knowledge management projects to knowledge flow management initiatives?

To see what might be next, it is worthwhile to look at the devel opments over the last few years—specifically the role of the Web and those developments (technically and socially) named under the umbrella term Web 2.0.

THE ROLE OF WEB 2.0++

There are a number of definitions of what Web 2.0 is, where it starts, and where it ends and something else starts. There is already talk about Web 3.0 and so on, so we might refer to it as Web 2.0++.

To say exactly which concepts and technologies were Web 1.0 and which ones were Web 2.0 is hard, and I will leave that discussion to others. It is not necessarily technical features that define the difference. Some of the technologies that now make headlines have been around longer than many people think. The technical possibility for user-editable Web pages, for example, were there for a while, but only the very easy interface and concept of a Wiki made it spread like it did. And with the clear benefit of a huge encyclopedia available to everybody for free, millions became familiar with the basic ...