Whatever happened to 'Business Knowledge Management'?

There's this whole corner of the internet dedicated to personal knowledge management ('PKM'). It's massive.

People spend hours of their spare time on this. They hang out in forums. They mail me and ask for guidance. They agonise over this stuff at home...

...and then they go to work and it's like it never happened.

'Knowledge management' doesn't go far enough

It's not like we haven't thought about this. There's a whole job function dedicated to knowledge management.

But whenever I've seen anyone in this role their focus tends to be on the organisation's databases. That SFIA description talks about your 'knowledge management database' but the word 'file' doesn't appear once.

Is it that the file system is just so unglamorous? It is, right, I know it is. (It's one of my fears in trying to make this my job: organising your files is, well ... boring.)

But that's no excuse to neglect it. Your internal knowledge databases may be amazing but that's only part of the picture.¹

Why is this okay?

The cost of being disorganised at home is negligible: you might be frustrated that you can't find your insurance documentation, but it's not costing literally hundreds of dollars an hour.

This is the problem that I intend to solve.