Last week at the Ark KM conference in Chicago, Joshua Fireman of ii3, Inc. and I co-led a workshop on making KM client facing. A dozen plus experienced knowledge management professionals participated and developed several potential plans.
Joshua and I summarized the key issues of client-facing KM systems and then formed three break-out groups, giving each a different scenario with the goal of creating and justifying a client-facing KM system. (Issues and scenario presentation.) All three groups proposed solutions involving a combination of extranets and/or blogs and RSS feeds.
Personally, I believe that interactive online systems (e.g., expert systems or document assembly), contract management, or compliance assistance is ultimately more valuable than content alone (whether delivered via extranets, blogs, or RSS). But the fact that three groups of experienced professionals from multiple firms converged on extranets and content delivery suggests the difficult challenges of creating innovative client-facing systems.