My KM Dissertation Proposal

I have been working on the proposal for my KM dissertation which I will be working on from now until mid-December 2007.

I have decided to focus on collaboration and knowledge sharing within the enterprise. I looked at my blog posts since I began back in April of this year, and noted that of the 27 posts, 15 were tagged collaboration and 13 were tagged knowledge sharing.

Next, I began thinking about my own work preferences and experience of working within an organisation. Most of us have to engage with others every day, but do we progressively learn from and improve on past experiences from project to project?

I like the concept of web 2.0 and how these tools are popular amongst younger professionals for interaction (blogging), social networking(facebook, myspace), and information management(RSS readers).

So, I have settled on:

“Enterprise 2.0 – Using web 2.0 tools to improve collaboration & knowledge sharing within the enterprise.”

Over the coming months I will be blogging on topics in relation to the dissertation and on peripheral matters relating to the implementation of these topics in real life. I will examine case studies and research papers focusing on the successes, failures and emerging best practices in this field.

A brief outline description for what I want to do is:

Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing are concepts which we are hearing more and more about. Web 2.0 tools are bringing people together in new ways and providing platforms for sharing knowledge and improving collaboration within the enterprise. However, the adoption of these tools and methods are being prohibited by misunderstanding of purpose and lack of defined ROI for business cases.

In this dissertation I want to explore the processes for which web 2.0 can provide improved efficiency and new ways of capturing, storing and utilizing intellectual property. Furthermore, I want to show how these tools can become interactive knowledge repositories which can make this information available to more and more individuals within an enterprise.

For me, the most important aspect of this is the sharing of information. Communication, collaboration and accessibility of the information are key to successful KM. I believe that the “freeing” of information, be it explicit (in documents, folders, intranet pages etc) or tacit (expert opinion, past experiences etc), allows an organisation to make best use of its intellectual capital.

So, I will be looking for lots of feedback and hopefully some discussion on specific areas I am studying. Looking forward to collaborating and sharing knowledge with you soon!