The topic of the Boston KM Forum on April 9, 2008 was “KM 2.0 – Real or Hype?” Let’s review presentations given at the meeting. Mark Frydenberg offered an excellent slide show called “Web 2.0 Tools for Knowledge Management.” Its strength was its coverage of Web 2.0. It included a slide with a number of embedded YouTube videos from Michael Wesch a professor of cultural anthropology teaching Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University. These videos have a great deal of impact in conveying the message that Web 2.0 is really a game changer in increasing the capacity of the web to help us to create a new level of self-organization of our ideas and views of the world. In addition, Mark provides a very useful slide identifying some 170 Web 2.0 product vendors. Other slides provide comparisons of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 using a very useful tag cloud from Luca Cremonini to characterize Web 2.0. He also provides good material on social bookmarking and tagging, and a nice section on mash-ups, which however, is a little too narrow in scope to cover the full range of mash-up applications. A good site for that is Kapow Technologies.
Where Mark Frydenberg sheds a lot less light, is in the area of the presentation dealing with KM and its relationship to Web 2.0. First, Mark doesn’t provide a definition of KM but does provide a slide entitled “Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management” that appears intended to relate the two. Its content is:
”– Share what you have learned, created, proved
— Innovate to be more creative, inventive, imaginative
— Reuse what others have already done
— Collaborate to take advantage of what others already know
— Learn by doing from others and from existing information”
While “share,” “Innovate,” and “learn” can certainly be viewed as “knowledge processing,” “reuse” and “collaborate” are as much about routine business processing, as they are about knowledge processing, and I don’t see anything in this list that’s directly focused on KM. I also don’t see anything that relates specific Web 2.0 applications to the five bullet points. I suspect Mark thinks that Web 2.0 applications are clearly related to these things. But I don’t think the relationship to anything except collaboration, and I’m afraid that collaboration is not, in itself, knowledge processing.
In a slide “entitled “2. – Social Media and Collaboration,” Mark says: “Managing Knowledge – take advantage of what other people know!” This is also part of the Collaborate tag line in the list above. Does this mean that, for Mark Frydenberg, KM means taking “advantage of what people know”? If so, Mark Frydenberg has a vastly mistaken impression, perhaps gleaned from a presentation of Stan Garfield’s which he cites in his KM slide. In sum, Mark’s presentation is excellent in the area of Web 2.0, but really falls short in relating Web 2.0 to KM.
A second presentation by Dan Keldsen entitled “Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management 2.0”. Dan provides two definitions for E 2.0. The first is Andrew McAfee’s:
“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”
The second is AIIM‘s:
“A system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.”
I, myself, prefer McAfee’s definition because it is cleaner and leads to easier assessment of the impact of tools alone. But the import of AIIM’s definition is clear. Apart from the 2.0 tools, it’s about rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence, and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise. All of these are important, but nowhere in this definition is there an a plain implication of the relationship of E 2.0 to KM or “KM 2.0.” Let’s see how Dan develops the relationship. The first thing he does is to offer Carl Frappaolo’s definition of KM as:
“Leveraging collective wisdom and experience to accelerate innovation and responsiveness”
I’m afraid I have no idea what “leveraging collective wisdom and experience . . . “ means. That phrase seems to replace one problem of definition with another. I also am not sure what’s meant by “responsiveness,” but insofar as it refers to decision making and action, rather than knowledge processing, I don’t think it’s directly related to KM. I do think that KM is about enhancing innovation in the very broad sense of problem solving, plus integration of new solutions into an enterprise. But, more precisely, I think it’s about enhancing sustainable innovation, and that anything else it is about is related to that governing idea in a supportive fashion.
Dan next goes on to talk about “KM 1.0,” and states the following about it: a) automatic analysis of e-mail patterns too much carried away with technology (“20 algorithms for extracting “knowledge” from the information flows”), b) Too little “painful knowledgebase interfaces for inputs (and outputs)” and individual short-term incentives, c) “lack of attention to culture (you get what you reward), and to teaming, teaming, long-term incentives, teaming, teaming,” d) systems where “big brother is watching you,” and e) “academic theory collides with reality.” Now, I think that, by-and-large, and if we agree that KM 1.0 is everything preceding “KM 2.0,” if, in fact, this is a coherent idea, then I think that this account of “KM 1.0” is seriously misleading. KM before the introduction of E 2.0 tools, has been a complex mosaic of diverse and often conflicting approaches.
One can get some of the flavor of this from an essay of mine and Mark McElroy called “Generations of KM.” But, since 2002, when that paper was written, KM has become even more diverse, and I can tell you it has not been mostly about automatic analysis of e-mail, and “lack of attention to culture.” It has not ignored teaming and has had very strong commitment to communities. It has not been about “big brother is watching you,” and as far as academic theory colliding with reality is concerned, it’s problem is that it has not relied enough on academic theory in such disciplines as philosophy, cognitive science, sociology, and organization theory. So rather than academic theory colliding with reality it has been a case of “practical people” running from fad-to-fad in an effort to master a stubborn reality that needs much more careful theory to solve its problems.
But then Dan goes on to point out that “KM 1.0” has frequently failed and that “knowledge remains blocked,” a point I largely agree with. KM has not had a great deal of success in general.
Dan then makes the point that Web 2.0 might enable us to unlock the knowledge that is in people’s heads, and he proceeds to point out that the primary issues of KM still remain. According to Dan, these issues are: a) brains, b) tools (Is e-mail the devil? Is it an abused tool?) and c) slowly changing culture. He then asks about “the solution.” And answers, 1) “capture knowledge work as daily work” (don’t capture knowledge separately), 2) recognize that knowledge is information applied and re-used, not just collected, 3) create a feedback enriching and simplifying knowledge, and 4) recognizing that good KM is about “loops and emergence.” Dan then went on to illustrate loops with John Boyd’s Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA Loop), and the Wiki Adoption Loop (Agenda, Minutes, Projects, Tasks). He then moves on to a discussion of AIIM’s survey of E 2.0 and begins to report on some results.
The AIIM study measured the “KM inclination” of an enterprise by “using 12 weighted profiling questions taken from KM2 Methodology.” Generally it found that the “KM inclined” were more involved with E 2.0 efforts on a number of dimensions of involvement. After examining this “overlap” between “KM-inclination” and E 2.0, Dan concludes by asking again whether E2.0 and KM 2.0 are the same thing.
Frankly, while I think the empirical results of the AIIM study are interesting, I think the overlaps found don’t really illuminate the relationship between KM and E 2.0 as a conceptual matter, since the fact that the “KM-inclined” are disproportionately concerned with E 2.0 says nothing about either whether use of E 2.0 in KM leads to good results, or about the conceptual relationship between KM 2.0 and E2.0, and these points don’t even consider a third, namely that the measurement of “KM-inclined” is likely to be very problematic if one assumes that the profile questions reflects some of the theoretical ideas about KM expressed above. In brief, I would have been happier if Dan had taken his conceptual analysis further and ended with a conjectured answer to the question he posed, that, at least, would have focused more attention on the notion of KM that AIIM is working with, and its relation to E 2.0. In my next installment, I’ll continue with a discussion of two other presentations from the Boston KM Forum.
To Be Continued