I heard a great talk by Jim Coogan this morning on the monthly SIKM call that is hosted by Stan Garfield of HP. Jim leads the Knowledge Process team in Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems group. Jim described a rich tapestry of KM capabilities that support Boeing’s definition of knowledge management: ” a disciplined holistic approach to effectively utilize expertise for competitive advantage.”

Boeing’s KM community is mature in that knowledge management expertise is spread widely across the company; practitioners in different roles in different divisions work as a community of practice to provide tools, methods, and techniques that can be applied to specific business problems and opportunities. Jim’s current approach and attitude to the onslaught of Enterprise 2.0 is, I think, typical of that of mature KM folks, and so I’d like to highlight a few of the topics that came up on the call.

• The past year has seen an upsurge of wikis, blogs, and the use of RSS feeds. He cited 300 active wikis as well as instances of senior managers who blog regularly.
• Instant messaging is in very wide use, and is used very specifically for getting business done.
• They are using SharePoint (MOSS) and getting ready to deploy SharePoint’s MySites, which they see as an opportunity to help people make connections and spread knowledge around the company even more.
• New hires need a jumpstart on building their social networks, so Boeing is careful to make sure that new hires get introduced to people who can help them build their networks quickly.

Despite the availability of new tools, many of the technical communities continue to use good old fashioned LISTSERVs, and Jim does not see that these will go away for a while. LISTSERVs are perhaps the original social tool. As I have seen, and as Jim suggested, they are a way to build a community, for people to get assistance and introductions into a specific knowledge space very quickly, and allow a great deal of freedom for conversation within a secure, behind-the-firewall environment. The challenge for companies who want to embrace Enterprise 2.0 is to integrate the LISTSERV content into the rich ecosystem of social tagging, linking, and expertise location.

Recall that leveraging expertise in their very definition of KM. I believe that for technology companies, and possibly for many others as well, it’s vital to be able to “connect the dots” as Jim says and bring experts together. Moreover, the big gap right now is having intelligent agents that anticipate what you need, bring it to you, and tell you how to connect with those others.

My previous blog on this topic touched on how important it is for search engines to return information about our connections with people who may have the expertise and experience we need to tap. We must also arrange for people to bump into each other (in physical and virtual spaces) who may not know that there is experience available for the tapping. Jim calls this the art of making “accidental collisions” — causing people to bump into each other so they can whatever sparks may be, will ignite.