A new research paper by the Economist Intelligence Unit (sponsored by EMC) reveals that organizational agility is critical for business success in the current economic climate. According to the study, 81% of the respondents think knowledge management and collaboration are the primary drivers to increase productivity, enhance performance and innovation. Read more.

A recent ZDNet post discusses Enterprise 2.0 and the software solution that most companies seem to be reaching for - Microsoft Sharepoint (now more commonly referred to as MOSS for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server). The author points out that all products, especially complex ones, have strengths and weaknesses (this is where the good, the bad and the ugly come in). Read the post.

This blog post at ZDNet puts a Knowledge Management spin on Cisco's acquisition of Pure Digital, the maker of the popular Flip camcorder. It makes sense from a pure business standpoint, since more video means more bandwidth, and that will drive demand for Cisco hardware. But with an integrated "YouTube for the enterprise" it will also give companies a powerful new tool for communication, training and organisational storytelling.

The Federal Knowledge Management Initiative Committee recently recommended the establishment of a federal knowledge management center to serve as a resource for agencies involved in managing the programs created from the recovery act. "There is no central clearinghouse of lessons learned or what works," the letter stated. "...reinventing the wheel is a wasteful duplication of effort." Sound familiar? Read the article.

Writing at the FastForward blog, Jon Husband describes the work of PersonAll, a French start-up that's building a kind of personalized knowledge work portal. The idea is to let works build their own unique approach to doing their jobs, while also making it easier to collaborate with others. In some ways the idea is similar to what can be done with an iGoogle page, but is intended to be deployed within a given organization. You can take a look here.

Without a Trace is a TV drama about people who go missing (and as the title suggests, often without a trace). This article suggests that this same disappearing act happens to organizational knowledge, sometimes through sabotage but more likely because knowledge was never shared or documented. The author suggests actions that can be taken to combat this issue, among them documentation audits, up-to-date job descriptions, policy databases and more.