Enterprise 2.0 is much more than knowledge management but KM is a piece of it and Enterprise 2.0 helps KM to achieve its early, and often unfulfilled, promise. However, looking at knowledge management at the enterprise level raises a paradox. To be successful, KM and portals must focus on real business challenges at the functional and process level. This results in function specific solutions and business cases. Attempts to build a generic enterprise business case for KM can fall into such vague concepts as “saving everyone twenty minutes a day” which become meaningless to balance sheet.

Does this mean that enterprise knowledge management is an oxymoron? Not necessarily as these divisional solutions can operate with improved results under a common enterprise infrastructure. This common structure can provide both operational efficiencies, clarity on governance issues, and enhanced cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing.

In a KM Review article, “Mastering Enterprise Knowledge Management,” (scroll down the list a bit to find the article) I did a few years ago with Kasper De Boer, we offer suggestions on how to get the most out of taking your KM efforts across the enterprise. There a series of key decisions to address.

First, you need to pick realistic goals to ensure that EKM stays aligned with enterprise business goals at the functional level. This is often bypassed to set up a organization.

You can then define and design the components of the EKM services. We list a number of EKM services that generally make sense at the enterprise level such as supporting end users, setting strategic goals, facilitating the careers of KM professionals, supporting knowledge communities, and taking care of the tools.

After that you can determine which services are best handled at a global, functional, or local level. This also allows you to decide which services to outsource, buy, or build internally.

The decisions do not stop here, an EKM organization and its services must be properly positioned with other enterprise support services such as learning and performance management. This final integration step is essential to successfully coordinate the efforts of each of these functions, both minimizing turf wars and optimizing enterprise level performance.

The article explores these decisions points in more depth and is built around several case examples. It also suggests some enterprise-wide goals for KM. When you are using Enterprise 2.0 to support knowledge management these issues remain on the table. The benefits of carefully designed enterprise support remain and should not be overlooked simply because the tools are so easy to implement at the grass roots level.