Development Seed Blog

Baseline Magazine Looks at How the Bank Does Knowledge Management

I received a nice email this morning with a link to an article on knowledge management and was pleasantly surprised to see that it named the World Bank as one of the top five companies that gets knowledge management. What great credit for the organization.

We’ve worked on several different knowledge management projects with the World Bank, from an intranet for its communications team to a community portal for its Global Development Learning Network to a news tracking system to help them follow development news, and have always been impressed with their ideas and commitment to using technology to better handle information.

From the article:

"Amidst the World Bank's recent management brouhaha, a more significant event has gone overlooked - the bank's dramatic transformation from a hierarchical source of low-interest loans to a decentralized organization that uses knowledge-sharing technologies to fight poverty and disease in developing nations. The enabler of this transformation: the bank's overhaul of its antiquated I.T. infrastructure and construction of a truly global network."

The World Bank certainly has developed some great new technology and systems to improve knowledge sharing and connect their worldwide team, so it’s great to see them get a shout out like this. I wonder how much of their forward thinking here was credited to their use of open source software and Drupal in some of these systems. Well, that didn’t make the article, but I’m still curious : )

You can read the whole article here.