It's a know fact that most health practitioners, lawyers and accountants tend to get business by way of personal referrals. This would obviously imply that unless they continued to do a good job that they would go out of business. Without perfect information flow this is not  the case and we all know that there is no such thing as perfect information flow.

The other thing we need to take into account is that professions do tend to protect themselves wherever possible which further stifles the flow of perfect information.  I have also noted that in certain countries there are professions where the blatant public (web) qualification of individuals is prohibited by law. These laws are in countries which promote free speech and equal opportunity no less.

With the new web there are certain Web sites which are gaining traction allowing you to view and give ratings and comments about individual practitioners in these fields.  Here is a site where you can rate a doctor for example: http://www.doctorrate.com/ and there are others.

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I have been preparing a series of interviews with the Linkedin Wikinomics group members. Here is the first of this series which is with DD Ganguly the CEO of   DimDim, the up and coming Open source Webinar collaboration tool.

The Interview covers off certain fundamental principals of the advantages of OpenSource, off-shoring, Platforms for participation and Collaboration tools.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8238868672991319074&hl=en 

Scholarly thinking has nearly always preceded the definitions tailored by the software industry. Definition's on terminology are important but will differ depending on what side of the balance sheet the definition now sits. KM is now being defined by the people making money from it and who are being paid to evangelize. The crux of KM comes down to how my company can be more effective and efficient and pay higher dividends to share holders. Staff attrition costs companies millions and is far more prevalent now than it was 30 years ago. That's a paradigm shift! You lose your people you lose your knowledge and often to your competitor. Companies have to get their heads around this and technology has helped. Corporate knowledge attrition is only one aspect of the KM field but I want to relate this comment to it.

By capturing the "deltas" of argument / discussion / creation on a daily weekly monthly basis in systems which relate to the particular "environment" in which they are being captured and then aggregating these, provides a knowledge pool. Web2.0 helps capture the "deltas" as well as creating tools which relate and appeal to the "environment" in which they are used. Systems can then aggregate and provide the ability to search and share experiences to prevent reinventing the wheel and slowing the operations down. The skill will be to present the knowledge pool back to the employees in a way that works for everyone. Dr Martin Porter at Cambridge University helped develop some very interesting Natural Language search algorithms back in the late 90's which disappointingly have still not been incorporated into our favourite search engines.

Aside: Your knowledge is often in the minds of others and this is your extended knowledge pool. Not to be forgotten and Web2.0's ability to maintain and tap ex-colleague relationships extends this and prolongs its useful life. In the future our employers will judge us on the quality/depth/proximity and not quantity of this extended Collaborative/Social Business Network