Knowledge management just seems inordinately complicated sometimes. Lucas McDonnell gives us 51 pieces of the knowledge management puzzle. The list ranges from academic areas of study to activities to technologies and beyond.

Via Knowledge Jolt with Jack.

Don’t blame the information-technology department when a tech project goes wrong. Blame yourself. Seventy-five percent of tech failures could be more accurately described as business failures.

Behind every failed tech project are business people who are unwilling to change the way they work or the way their organizations are structured.

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A new study by Rubicon Consulting released today at the AJAXworld Conference in Santa Clara, California indicates that web apps have spread beyond the so-called “early adopter” set and have made their way into the consciousness of a majority of web users. [...] According to the study, which surveyed 2,000 randomly selected US adults who have a personal computer (Linux, Windows, and Mac), 80% said they had heard of web applications. More than half have actually tried a web application and 37% use at least one on a regular basis. That’s more than the 16% usually thought of as early adopters, said Rubicon. The survey defined web applications as “websites that replace a task the user previously performed using a software application installed on the PC.”

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According to a new report released by AMR Research, U.S. companies will spend $73B on knowledge management software in 2007, and spending will grow nearly 16% to an average of $1,224 per employee in 2008. As a growing number of needs and initiatives are left unsupported by established enterprise applications, the demand for KM technologies has increased, leading to record-level activity in knowledge management; content management; navigation, search, and retrieval; and collaboration platforms.

Other highlights of the report include:

• Collaboration, digital asset management (DAM), and customer- and supplier-facing portals are the biggest areas of planned investment.
• The preferred KM purchasing models are shifting from traditional licensing to software-as-a-service (SaaS) and open source.

• Enterprise 2.0 Success Stories from Awareness
• Enterprise Wiki Success Story from Janssen-Cilag
• Making Wikis Work at Novell
• An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department
• User Generated Content Success at Little League Baseball
• Enterprise Blog and Wiki Success Story from Traction Software - UK’s National Health Service (NHS) Orkney
• Another Enterprise Blog and Wiki Success Story from Traction – Shore Bank
• Enterprise 2.0 Examples of Managing Projects in the Tools and Food Industries
• Enterprise 2.0 Success Stories on the New Sharepoint.

Via Portals and KM.

The InfoWorld blog points to a recent survey showing that corporate email is becoming more expensive than ever. The survey, conducted by Osterman Research, looked at just over 100 enterprises with an average of 6,636 email users and found that a majority are concerned about the expense associated with migrating to Microsoft Exchange 2007. The survey showed that organizations face steep costs to migrate to the new email server, and, “messaging storage growth is a serious or very serious problem.” Regarding messaging storage growth, the problem people think they’re facing is having enough available storage space for archives of message, but I think the bigger problem is that all those stored messages aren’t doing much good because people can’t do much with them. Email is not an archival tool for information, which makes accessing and reusing that information difficult.

Technology consultancy Capgemini will begin recommending Google Inc.’s online suite of office software to its corporate customers, bolstering the Internet search leader’s effort to drum up more sales to big businesses.

The partnership to be announced Monday represents the first time one of the world’s top technology consulting services has embraced Google’s software bundle, which includes e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and calendar management.

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“I’ve always been wary of KPIs in knowledge management, because they appeal to a tangible measurement mindset that is easily distracted from the intangible and hard-to-pin down outcomes of KM efforts. I can’t tell you how may implementations I’ve seen where the measurements are diligently gathered and presented as tokens of success (number of documents, number of contributions, number of sharing sessions) when behind the metrics facade, the KM culture and rich sharing habits are as dead as a doornail.”

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Companies trying to figure out how to deal with the proliferating use at work of social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Bebo may want to check the advice released last week [.pdf] by Britain’s Trades Union Congress (TUC).

In a nutshell, the TUC is advising companies — in Britain at least — that the outright banning of such sites in the workplace may be something of an “overreaction.” Instead, the group said, it’s much better to cut employees some slack and focus on setting up formal policies for acceptable use of such sites in the workplace.

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Coleman Parkes recently surveyed more than 400 CIOs and IT directors in North America and Europe about their views on collaboration and communication within and beyond the enterprise.

“Less than half of U.S. and Canadian enterprises surveyed are satisfied with the impact of current collaborative and communication technologies, including email, intranets and video conferencing. However, nearly all of these companies see significant benefits in the new wave of collaboration and communication technologies and, over the next two years, plan to invest in such technologies as enterprise search tools, virtual workspaces, and voice over IP (VoIP).”