The Top 10?

One thing I've noticed about being in this field we call KM is the diversity of experiences of practitioners, researchers, and those just plain interested in the topic. From a previous post, a suggestion was made that maybe we could come up with a "Top 10," or even "Bottom 10" of KM ideas, techniques, tactics, or gotchas. That seems to me to be a pretty good idea. While I haven't thought through all the permutations of such lists, I guess I'd like to throw out one thought that I believe is universal, yet is also a thought that is universally gone unheeded.

The thought is, "If you build it, they won't necessarily come." That's in reference to the idea that if an organization builds a comprehensive intranet, with spiders, with external links, with yellow pages, and so on, that it won't necessarily result in knowledge sharing. I think that this thought has proven immutable, yet organizations still routinely go the route of building an intranet first and then wonder why nothing happens.

Whether this is a top 10 or bottom 10 idea doesn't matter to me, but I'd like to hear from others on this or similar words of wisdom that seem to have stood the test of (KM) time.