Starting a strategic effort: What to do first?

What's the first thing you do when starting a knowledge management project?

There are lots of choices, but I'd pick "Establish your feedback loop with your users" as an early favorite. We're doing something new for our users. They don't know exactly how they'll use our new service, so why should we?

Look at Flickr, the photo sharing service. It was intended as a feature for an online game called "Game NeverEnding", but it was completed before the rest of the game, the startup company realized they were on to something and threw away their original idea in favor of their photo sharing subsidiary, and a few years later sold Flickr to Yahoo for $30 million dollars.

You can no more know the future of how your users will use your work than Dilbert's boss can be alerted in advance of unscheduled outages. All you can do is plan to adapt, and for that you need to listen to your users.