Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) a threat to your career? Yes. But read on.

AI is likely to have an increasingly significant impact on the knowledge management profession over time. But with the right strategy, you can be assured of remaining employed in your chosen field.

This month I co-hosted a webinar on gamification with KM expert Stan Garfield. In this post I’ll share a few key takeaways that jumped out at me during the session.

All our software is developed on a platform we call LucideaCore, with the key advantage that enhancements made for one Lucidea product can be easily leveraged with others, keeping costs down and speeding deployment. We recently launched a project to make our software more accessible to people with disabilities. By virtue of our platform-based approach to developing KM solutions, related new capabilities will soon be incorporated into all LucideaCore products.

In a June 2016 article titled The Evolution of Social Technologies, McKinsey & Company reported that the use of social technologies has evolved to include their use as tools for developing Organizational Strategy. Knowledge management (KM) professionals and librarians need to recognize this represents an opportunity for them to contribute to organizational success at the highest level.

Earlier this year, we presented a “KM Conversation” with well-known enterprise social network expert and consultant Euan Semple. During our session “The New Knowledge Ecosystem: Content and Connection,” Lucidea’s COO Phil Green engaged Euan in a discussion of how social sharing and the wisdom of the crowd enable meaningful and necessary participation in professional digital networks.

Every job has its pluses and minuses. Consider dentists: great work environment, good pay and definitely needed. However, does anyone really appreciate their dentist? Same deal for doctors—and KM professionals. How does one stay excited about one’s career?

Pilots can’t fly their planes unless they have instruments that tell them what the plane is doing at all times, and where it’s heading. KM professionals need instruments too, in order to assess whether the products and services they are providing are valued, and to understand what additional products and services might be needed.

Most of us don’t buy software very often. In fact, unless you are a senior Information Technology Manager, you may do so only a couple of times in your career. The most common software selection problems are easily avoided with a little advance planning.

Every organization has a disaster recovery plan. Knowledge Management has a key role to play in ensuring your organization’s survival.

The concept of accountability often has negative emotions attached to it. Ever wonder why that is? Maybe it’s the “hot potato” syndrome. Too many of us have been held accountable for events we have no hope of controlling.

In my last post I discussed problems with the shared drive and SharePoint as knowledge management solutions. With these systems adoption is high (everybody is in the pool) because they are simple, but due to lack of an information management strategy the content is often a mess.

In this post, I’ll discuss strategies for building successful KM systems that achieve high adoption while simultaneously providing access to organized content. In other words, throwing a KM Pool Party that isn’t a hot mess.

The most common KM tool for sharing documents and other items with colleagues is the shared drive. But why is that, and is it really such a good idea?

Knowledge management has an image problem. Nobody really knows what KM is, and it’s very easy to devalue. Companies that provide KM software need to market themselves via use cases (a technique that identifies the business goals to be accomplished by a software system) in order to make the light bulb go on for prospective customers. Individual practitioners need to do something similar.

Business content providers such as Lexis, Westlaw, Factiva and ProQuest are about to face a new wave of competitors due to the increasing digitization of information resources. Just as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu disrupted the personal entertainment sector by enabling viewers to avoid purchasing “bundles” that include content they don’t want, competitors in the business content space will soon apply similar disruptive pressures on traditional business content providers.

One of the biggest challenges when implementing a knowledge management strategy or platform is getting leadership buy-in and visible advocacy. If you have that, it goes a long way to solving a second significant challenge: user engagement and adoption. A sticky marketing approach can help.

Many organizations spend a small fortune building their intranets. They’re often based on very detailed specifications and take a long time to implement – so successful rollouts and decent user adoption are causes for celebration. And then, the years roll by …until a once-innovative intranet really starts to show its age. You might be faced with this challenge – but do you know what to do about it?

Recently, one of our clients told us, “I feel Lucidea’s purpose is similar to ours.” But what, really, is our shared purpose? It’s to help people “Think Clearly.”

We’ve been thinking a lot lately about the term “end user,” which is how most special librarians and knowledge management professionals refer to those who benefit from their services, content and products. We believe there are fundamental differences between “end users,” “customers” and “clients”—which if recognized, accommodated and leveraged, can significantly impact the library’s role and perception within an organization.