The KnowTech 2006 conference, organised by the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (Bitkom), took place during the Systems Fair in Munich at the end of October.
Conferences nowadays have the opportunity to have a whole new category of participants (and to attract further attention): non-attendees interested in the topics and in bringing together pieces of feedback and entries out of the blogosphere. Unfortunately, the KnowTech conference only got three relevant mentions in Technorati and two hits in Google’s “Blogsuche Beta”. A meagre result considering that three out of the eight trends identified by Bitkom working group members have a direct reference to Web 2.0 technologies.
So, what are the KM trends in Germany? Bitkom has released a new report called “Knowledge Management 2006-2010: Positions and Trends” (only in German). The report introduces the following eight trends which Bitkom’s Knowledge Management & Engineering working group says will characterize Knowledge Management over the next five years:
1. KM will be seen as an essential enabler for the high-performance workplace
2. KM will be of strategical importance for companies of all sizes, and will be further integrated with process, skill and innovation management
3. Politics will recognise the outstanding importance of KM as a competitive factor for Europe
4. Knowledge transfer will be one of the key success factors in the global value creation networks
5. Social networking functions will build a new generation of IT-based solutions
6. A web service-based architecture framework supporting KM functions will develop step by step, eventually becoming standard
7. E-learning offerings will change rapidly due to the integration of social networking approaches
8. The blending of semantic technologies and social networking technologies will improve the access to multilingual, multimedial, archive and embedded content via the Internet.
And here are some of the few people who are putting into practice the German KM trends:
Simon Dueckert has published some of his personal memos about presentations in the blog of his company Cogneon. Andreas Blumauer (The Semantic Web School) focuses on one major trend of the new Bitkom report on “Knowledge Management 2006-2010”: the growing importance of social networking technologies. The presentation of “skillMap” seems to have impressed him and also Peter H. Reiser who presented Sun’s global approach on how to measure Knowledge Management.
P.S. I don’t exactly understand why skillMap should be so outstanding: it’s simply a graph-based visualization of the interrelationships between two kinds of objects: people and skills. Nothing more (or am I missing the point?!).