The last few days I've been reading a lot about KM, especially in relation to SME's. What strikes me is that (still) many authors see knowledge management as a technology solution. Put what you know in a knowledge base and you implement KM in the organisation, that's what they write. For me, knowledge management is more than that, technology is only (a very small) part of it.
A few years ago (1999) three collegues and I wrote a booklet, called in Dutch "Kennismaken met kennismanagement" (in Dutch it sounds nicer than a translation in English: Getting familiar with knowledge management). In that booklet we distinguished three approaches: knowledge storage; knowledge processes; and learning processes (actually, we had four approaches with knowledge measuring as the fourth, but this one is a bit out of line with the others).
The first approach has the technology focus, the one I still read so much about. And I thought that our three approaches could be seen as a movement in thoughts. The second (processes) is related to BPR - business process reengineering. And the third deals with organisational learning and communities.
When people (authors) say that knowledge management has failed, I think they have this technology focus in mind. We know that we need more than a data base to share our ideas and what we've learned. In relation to the SME's (who are affraid that they need to buy expensive tools) I found that SME's sometimes do much what we call "knowledge management", which they are not aware of, since their communication lines are very short and every one knows what the other knows. For me, this is also knowledge management.
Sometime I want to yell: No, knowledge management is more than technology! Why don't you see.
I know that anyone on the Internet can be a dog, and most of us are knowledge animals, but now I read that a cat keeps his (political) weblog. I haven't asked my cat Jasmijn if she want her own weblog. Maybe it's better that I don't let her. I don't want to read how often I leave her alone ... (I'm sorry!).