Will KM be as important as ERP?

The ERP is obviously a very important part of every organisations core systems. In the big end of town it’s referred to as ERP (aka SAP, Oracle, JDE, etc...) but most people will know it as the finance system.
The finance system is most organisations' core mission critical system. Without it, they can't invoice, process, trade, receive and basically operate the organisation.

The finance systems in all organisations have really only become the lifeblood because the traditional finance system of GL, accounts payable/receivable have been extended to major platforms (now known as ERP) and do a lot more. Take SAP for example - it has a portal, supply chain mgt, business process mgt, integration, etc... to name a few, so it’s obvious that this is the major platform for many organisations.

However the ERP platform deals with structured processes very well and transactions very well. There is still a massive gaping whole with unstructured systems. I am talking about e-mails, documents, web sites, images, etc..., the list goes on. This makes up for most of the data within an organisation but most of the time it is dumped on file shares (similar to the storage bin) and rarely recalled again.

Enter KM = Knowledge Management.
Knowledge Management as defined on Wikipedia is
"Knowledge Management (KM) comprises a range of practices used in an organisation to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences."

Yes I know that doesn't state unstructured explicitly but that's the greatest challenge.

How do you capture, retain, reuse, manage information that becomes tacit knowledge throughout the organisation to then harness and compete on a far grander scale.

I believe organisations that embrace knowledge management as a key executive item on the agenda (i.e. hire a CKO) and invest appropriately will deliver tens of times bigger returns than their competitors. The reason is because their ability to gather, store, share and reuse will be so powerful it will get products to the market faster, more reliably and with greater competitive advantage. Knowledge will be retained within the organisation rather than walked out when staff leave.

Watch, KM will one day be as important if not more important than the ERP.

CFO's better realise this, and get on the bandwagon.

Librarians, records managers, knowledge managers, and everyone else in this industry - your career prospects are very exciting.