Kudos to Lynda Moulton at the Enteprise Search Practice Blog for a post entitled “Apples and Orangutans: Enterprise Search and Knowledge Management“. She criticises some commentary in CIO Magazine that “search is being implemented in enterprises as the new knowledge management”. Her thesis in a nutshell is that “knowledge management (KM) is not now, nor has it ever been, a software product or even a suite of products”. If that’s not enough to get you to read the full article, here’s an excerpt:
Because I follow enterprise search for the Gilbane Group while maintaining a separate consulting practice in knowledge management, I am struggling with his conflation of the two terms or even the migration of one to the other. The search we talk about is a set of software technologies that retrieve content. I’m tired of the debate about the terminology “enterprise search” vs. “behind the firewall search.” I tell vendors and buyers that my focus is on software products supporting search executed within (or from outside looking in) the enterprise on content that originates from within the enterprise or that is collected by the enterprise. I don’t judge whether the product is for an exclusive domain, content type or audience, or whether it is deployed with the “intent” of finding and retrieving every last scrap of content lying around the enterprise. It never does nor will do the latter but if that is what an enterprise aspires to, theirs is a judgment call I might help them re-evaluate in consultation.
The Noisy Channel 