increasingly I'm starting to see software titles for corporates that represent themselves as 'Knowledge Management Systems Software' or words combing these magic words in some order. The idea is a clear and a seductive one; you can somehow take what is in the heads of your people and make it magically available to future generations via some computer-based information technology. With all the features and marketing hype around such software, it is important to remember some fundamentals:

The technologies and standards used to store electronic information have not been around for a very long time at all and there is no guarantee that you will be able to meaningfully access knowledge stored in a piece of software in years to come. This is because hardware and software standards change constantly. I found this out when I was trying to retrieve my old lecture notes from Wits that I had stored on a 360KB floppy - although I had a technology to read the disk, it was totally blank after 15 years of storage.

Somehow we are making enormous assumptions about our society and infrastructure if we assume to be able to access systems - sometimes on the other side of the planet - instantly. What happens if suddenly you can't access your laptop? If the internet is down? What happens if you you don't have hardware or electricity? What do we have to fall back on?

Steve Banhegyi
steve@storytelling.co.za