Can KM Save the Internet?

Whither the Internet?  An interesting article by Robert Samuelson, a syndicated economic columnist, got me to pondering this very lofty question, and wondering if perhaps KM can save it from its foibles.

Samuelson’s column, "The Internet Predicament," summarizes the reasons why the Internet has lost a lot of its luster.  First, it hasn’t turned out to be as efficient, convenient or appealing a way of delivering goods and services as everyone thought it would be.  In fact, as a standalone “B2C” (business-to-consumer) business platform, it stinks.  While marginal costs (the expense of producing or selling one more item) are low, average costs (the expense of providing the service in the first place) are high, and companies can only survive in the long run if they can recover their average costs.  

Second, the apparent cheapness of information is a mirage.  The Internet does deliver tons of information at very little cost to the end user, but the bottom line is that very little of it winds up having much real value, in that it is not useful in producing something of higher value.  Meanwhile, the cost of producing all that information is much higher than anyone expected it would be.  

Third, while its original premise was as a whole new means of communications, we’re still a long way from the convergence panacea – the seamless merging of voice, video and data communications – that the technology purveyors have been promising for what seems like forever.

All of this got me to thinking about an interesting little paradigm that some of the propeller-heads at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) came up with back in the early days of e-consulting.  The idea, Advanced Internet Presence (AIP), postulated four goals for companies that wanted to use the Internet to truly change the way they do business:

• Conduct electronic transactions – E-commerce, pure and simple.
  
  
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