davidjf

No doubt information and communication technologies, as a major media, can create emotions, through messages, chatting, music and video, ...

But can computer software detect and understand your emotions, and answer to them. Are we, after all those years, close enough from "artificial intelligence" ?

A lot of new experiments these days on that, from neural networks to telephones....

All the chatterbots are trying too the same kind of things from basic Cybelle to sophisticated A.L.I.C.E. (why always female as characters for clever intelligence robots ? )

At man/machine interface point of view, in spite of some random pleasant progress (Wii?) is still at prehistorical age, unable for example to really interact easily without a keyboard, language semantic recognition being still far enough...

Good News: Knowledge Management still alive.

In spite of vendors appropriation of KM logo ( just type "Knowledge Management" on Google and you will find 90% of the connected sites are selling something, products, tools, consulting, ....), fundamentals of KM are surviving.

Recent contributions:

- Relation of KM with semantic web and web2 (with this permanent problem of the balance between "coding the world" and creativity freedom!). See too that nice reaction on this topic

- Thoughts about economy of Knowledge, stimulating contributions and co

- and, and, and, and, and ....

If you want to follow periodically the trends in KM (or anything else!), a good way is to use Google alert , to receive information in your mailbox...

Try too, through Google labs, to see that KM queries are nowadays

- less "fashion" than 3 years before (because we know enough about fundamentals?)

- that queries are mainly done now by far east and emerging countries (does that mean that they discover now the concepts, or that innovation by knowledge will come more and more from this part of the world?)

Must management concept be seriously treated?

Real world modelization is useful. It is good to reflect real thoughts by concepts and frameworks.

But where is the limit between ready to use, "gadget" concepts and real thinking?

Just look at this site. Not so bad, but ....

Let's take, as a basic example, the famous overused BCG growth/share matrix.

We can go further on that on wikipedia, with a bit more in-depth approach.

Look at this one * (I really like this second degree representation). A good representation of the visualization tools. Try it.

Is that enough to understand, or do we need a full business school education on that?

Basic conclusion:

"The map is not the territory" ( Korzybski, "founder" of General Semantics)

Information (even with a good visualization technique) is not Knowledge!

All those models and frameworks become useful only if you have the opportunity to really use them in real situations, in real life!

* I have been warned of this by this nice forum on intelligence (in french, I am member since years...)