I thought I would post a quick comment on a trend that I’ve been seeing in Australian public-sector organisations: knowledge management becoming records management.

That is, the “knowledge management initiative” is handed across to the library/records management folk, who then implement projects such as:

• records management systems
• document management systems
• corporate taxonomies/thesaurii

While these are all important things to do, they are obviously only a very small corner of knowledge management. Yet, in many organisations I’ve seen, this is all that’s left of the initial enthusiasm about KM.

In these situations, there is no focus on the people-related aspects (such as communities of practice, or knowledge sharing in general), nor on the cultural or process issues within the organisation.

I find this a worrying trend, as it suggests a general decline of KM across the industry as a whole, with what’s left just being subsumed by existing disciplines such as records/document management.

My question: is this just an oddity of the Australian public-sector, or have others noted this same trend elsewhere?

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