I was drawn to Venkat’s post on the Enterprise 2.0 blog via What Ralph Knows. Venkat suggests that Knowledge Management and Social Media are in conflict, with younger people preferring an anarchic, organic approach to building knowledge repositories, while older people prefer highly planned structures, and Generation X (of which I am one) remain neutral. I’m always a bit suspicious of generational divisions, as there are plenty of older innovators and young reactionaries, but I must admit I take a “best of both worlds” approach – so I conform to my generational stereotype!
I think the “battle” mirrors the taxonomy/folksonomy debate and experts I’ve asked about this suggest that the best way is to find a synergy. It all depends on the context, what is being organised, and what is needed. So social media are obviously great for certain things, but I’d hate to trust the company’s financial records to a bunch of accountants who said – “oh we don’t bother sorting and storing our files – if we need to prove your tax payments we’ll just stick a post on a forum and see if anyone still has the figures….”
A friend of mine just emailed me one of your articles from a while back. I read that one a few more. Really enjoy your blog. Thanks
This is a debate which is going on in a lot of places. And, i agree with you that we need a synergy between the two approaches (maybe because i come from a particular generation … somewhere between W and X?).
Thanks Atul.
I am now wondering if Records Management is part of Knowledge Management or something different.
If Knowledge Management confines itself to that “knowledge stuff” in people’s heads then a socially-based, if not social media as such, approach could do some really exciting things. I read the other day about some”social search” engines that use social networks as a way of filtering or relevance ranking results and there is something to be said for finding out what different groups of people are reading (academics, entrepreneurs, your colleagues). I spoke to Nigel the CEO of Trexy.com search trails the other day who said some very clever things about information being fossilised ideas and the only way to bring them to life is to add people into the equation.
I am also very much caught up between the “everything is contextual” (e.g. Social Media-ism) notion and “we need a solid theory” approach (essentially positivism vs interpretivism). I will now go and read Helen Longino who is supposed to deal well with this (concerning epistemology) and try to write a proper post about it.
Above and Beyond KM has a good post on this too and a nice rejoinder about taking age too seriously: Age is a state of mind.