Usability, IA and knowledge management

I spent two days last week at a KM conference in Sydney. All very interesting, and I had many thought-provoking conversations. Again, though, I am struck by the following: Most knowledge management professionals are completely unaware of the work being done in either the usability or information architecture (IA) fields. I find this surprising, as there is considerable overlap between the interests of these fields. In particular, needs analysis techniques are very similar in all three cases, but are much better documented in usability and IA than they are in KM. In many ways, usability and IA are much more mature than KM, and they are certainly much more widely used and tested. [Column Two]