I believe that metadata, with its rigorous information models, might be the salvation for knowledge management at least for IT...
The problem with most KM solutions I have seen is that too much depends on the Taxonomy Gods. That is the all-powerful committee tasked with subdividing the knowledge domains and coding the knowledge resources so that people can retrieve documents. While this is a necessary function, it has hardly proven sufficient -- the uptake of KM as a capability is pretty dismal in a lot of organizations that have tried it.
I think the problem here is the inherent subjectivity of taxonomy creation, and people's unwillingness to invest time in climbing the learning curve of another's knowledge categorization philosophy.
I don't have a general solution for this, but there is a particular section of KM that dovetails with metadata: how to manage the volumes of unstructured documentation generated in building and running IT systems. Source control repositories don't cut it; they are no better than file systems as far as retrieval goes. However, a metadata repository can be an ideal solution. Since metadata is generally objective and unambigous, and does not have to be shoehorned into a hierarchical taxonomy, it provides a more robust framework on which to hang knowledge assets.
For example, a metadata repository might have a record for a given server (assuming the repository is handling technical metadata). This server is a known fact, one that everyone in the IT shop can agree on. Therefore its record is an ideal consensus point on which to hang documentation, because people will go looking for the server by an unambiguous name and will probably be interested in whatever they can find pertaining to it.
The same goes for databases, queues, components, batch jobs -- all the major elements of the IT infrastructure.
Like I said, it doesn't solve the general crisis of KM. But for IT shops trying to leverage their masses of Word and Visio documents, a metadata-driven KM framework is an intriguing possibility.
-ctb
