After spending some time categorizing the elements of knowledge management, it became obvious that knowledge management actually consists of many rather disparate components.

While it would be nice to think that these components always complement each other, it also seems apparent from this list that there is certainly an inordinate focus on technologies.

So the obvious question that stems from these observations is: is knowledge management bloated? Have too many other domains, technologies and processes been borrowed by or absorbed into knowledge management, causing practitioners to lose focus on the people side of things?

If we take a look at the basics of knowledge management, we often see information technology listed as an ‘enabler’ of strategic knowledge management initiatives. Yet to look at this another way, it would seem that as more and more technologies are thrown into the ring, it becomes more and more difficult to focus on which technologies should be doing what.

I talked about the obsession with wikis a few weeks ago, and how wikis are often touted as the solution to any particular problem. Yet wikis are often implemented where a simpler solution (a forum, for example) would not only have sufficed, but may have been a better fit.

So if a wiki is part of a knowledge management strategy, and we consider a forum a knowledge sharing tool as well, isn’t pretty much any web or intranet page also a part of that strategy? And by extension, should an organization’s whole information technology infrastructure not be subsumed under knowledge management, since it’s all ‘knowledge-related’?

With knowledge management’s drive at inclusiveness in terms of technologies and processes, there has been very little that has been defined as clearly outside the scope of KM.

I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts on this — is there anything you can think of that is definitively not part of knowledge management? Is it useful to define terms, processes and technologies as inside or outside the knowledge management sphere?