I presented at the ARK Group’s KM Australia conference in Sydney last week. The title of my presentation was ‘Enterprise 2.0 – Breathing new life into KM’. A bold claim? Probably, but the whole point is to initiate some debate.

I firmly believe all the tools, connectivity and behaviours associated with what we call Web 2.0, or Enterprise 2.0 within an organization, have the power to turn many of our knowledge or information management efforts on their head. For the better. Over the next few posts I’ll elaborate on some of the thinking behind the presentation.

So my presentation followed the journey I took with Annalie Killian and the excellent folks at AMP, where we implemented a collaboration platform, which included wikis, blogs and the like, to address knowledge management challenges.

Without playing the generation card too heavily, the very real risk for many organizations today is the opportunity they might be losing. We have new generations walking in the corporate door with all the skill and will to connect. They do it every day – it is part of their lives. And yet we often hand over little more than an email account and access to a share drive. Some organizations don’t allow access to Facebook and other social networking sites. In short, we switch them off.

And when knowledge management often struggles with switching people on, it seems like a wasted opportunity.

A real strength of enterprise 2.0 tools is how they connect people. They link people to other people and to information and knowledge assets, in a less formal, but no less effective way than more structured knowledge tools. Why wouldn’t you leverage behaviours that are likely to bring business benefit?