Dave Snowden has a great post on the folly of KM professionals'

running claim that failures such as 9/11 and Katrina are in effect failures of knowledge management. Words like standards are also being bandied about which is always a bad sign and one gets a very real sniff of a bureaucracy in the worst sense of the word

In effect the argument, which is common one in knowledge management, was that the failure was one of not connecting the dots, not realising the significance of key data items early enough. The idea is that we create bigger and bigger databases with more search algorithms, centralise functions, standardise procedures, appoint an obergruppenführer and somehow or other no future errors will be made.