In a noted blog posted on September 28, 2008, Venkatesh Rao made a number of claims about the relationship between the KM and social media movements. I’ll end this examination of the relationships between KM and the 2.0 cluster by using aspects of my previous analysis to examine his primary claims about the existence of a culture war between KM and social media. Here are some quotes from his post.
“You’d think Knowledge Management (KM), that venerable IT-based social engineering discipline which came up with evocative phrases like “community of practice,” “expertise locater,” and “knowledge capture,” would be in the vanguard of the 2.0 revolution. You’d be wrong. Inside organizations and at industry fora today, every other conversation around social media (SM) and Enterprise 2.0 seems to turn into a thinly-veiled skirmish within an industry-wide KM-SM shadow war. . .
“Here’s what’s going on: KM and SM look very similar on the surface, but are actually radically different at multiple levels, both cultural and technical, and are locked in an undeclared cultural war for the soul of Enterprise 2.0. And the most hilarious part is that most of the combatants don’t even realize they are in a war. They think they are loosely-aligned and working towards the same ends, with some minor differences of emphasis. So let me tell you about this war and how it is shaping up. . . .”
Rao goes on to present some anecdotes illustrating three past conflicts between people who identify their work as KM work, and himself, and also, after assuming the truth of his conjecture that there is a culture war between KM and SM, explains in detail that this war is due to generational conflicts between the boomer and millennial generations. I won’t comment on his explanation of “the culture war” as generational, since there’s no need to do that unless a culture war between KM and SM can be shown to exist.
Rao expends little effort in explaining what he means by either “KM” or “social media,” and certainly doesn’t relate his view of KM to any literature, but simply assumes that his readers will understand what he means by both terms, and also that his view of KM is in accord with that of KM practitioners. This is problematic, because if readers want to evaluate his conjecture that there is a cultural war he has given them very little to go on to evaluate it. And, as we shall see, what he has provided is not encouraging.
Specifically, Rao characterizes KM as a “venerable IT-based social engineering discipline,” — a very vague characterization indeed. And as Michael Novak, a fairly well-known KM practitioner, said in an apt comment on Rao’s blog: “Just like the Holy Roman Empire was not holy, not Roman, and not an empire, KM is not venerable, not IT-based, and not about “social engineering” (whatever that is).”
So, if Rao does view “the thing” that is at war with social media as a “venerable IT-based social engineering discipline,” Novak’s comment suggests that Rao is not referring to either the KM that Novak practices, or to the KM that I’ve been practicing, and talking and writing about for the past ten years, including in this article. I do think that if a “venerable IT-based social engineering discipline” exists, that one would expect a serious cultural conflict with social media, and even that it may be locked in an undeclared cultural war for the soul of Enterprise 2.0. However, I think that if there is such a discipline its name is Information Engineering, or perhaps Information Technology itself, but not Knowledge Management.
Rao responded to Novak’s comment with this:
“The very urge to frame debates according to canonical definitions is a KM way (a couple of the response posts also picked this rebuttal model) :). I stand by my anecdotal observation that in practice KM is IT-based and about ’social engineering’ in practice, whatever the attempts to define KM may have attempted. ‘Venerable’ was my attempt at humor about the rate at which things become ‘classic’ in IT. You don’t get to define what KM is based on your sense of what it ought to be.”
The first sentence of this reply mentioning the role of canonical definitions in KM may or may not be true, but it’s truth is not really relevant here, is it? The issue is whether we need to know what “KM” is, according to Rao, in order to evaluate his claim about “the culture war.” Clearly, we do, and his assertion that it is an IT-based, social engineering discipline (forget about the “venerable”) provides no confidence that his assertion of the existence of a culture war is true, because the idea that KM is an IT-based social engineering discipline sounds really far-fetched at the end of 2008, at least to those practicing KM.
Rao claims that “in practice KM is IT-based and about ’social engineering’. . . “ I think that this is factually untrue. Our disagreement might be settled by empirical testing of this conjecture, but only after he tells us exactly what he means by the vague terms “IT-based” and “social engineering.” Many who practice KM will, perhaps, agree that KM initiatives frequently introduce IT tools or prescribe their use to enhance knowledge processing, knowledge processes, knowledge harvesting, etc. This is certainly true with respect to 2.0 tools, but, not many KM practitioners will agree that KM as a set of processes is about introducing IT tools of any generation. Put simply, that is IE or IT, not KM.
Once again, what KM is about is implementing efforts at enhancing one or more aspects of knowledge processing. Such efforts will frequently make use of IT tools, but they need not; and even when they do, the larger context is always one of a combined social and technological intervention.
Rao says: “You don’t get to define what KM is based on your sense of what it ought to be.” Well, that may be true, but in an emerging discipline where there is such great disagreement over its core concerns, and where KM may be many, many things, much of which will be not be viewed as KM when the discipline does come to greater agreement on basics, you also don’t get to define what KM is based on your sense of what it ought to be in order to advance the narrative that there is a culture war between “KM” and “social media” for “the soul of Enterprise 2.0.”
Rao’s very phraseology suggests that his view of KM is at variance with the view held by KM practitioners. After all, what is Enterprise 2.0? According to McAfee it is, again, “. . . the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.” But why should KM care about “the soul” of that? Why should KM practitioners fight with anyone about that? What is any X.0 version of the Enterprise to us? We are agnostic about such IT things. We use them when they fit, and use other tools and procedures when they don’t.
Our interest is in improving the adaptive capability of the complex adaptive systems we call organizations, and also in our own personal adaptive capability. It is in growing high quality knowledge, and also in making sure that the information and knowledge previously generated in our collectives is available to people who need it to do their jobs and to solve problems as they see those jobs and those problems. It is in building organizations that learn better, and that meet challenges better, and that distribute knowledge processing and knowledge better. But it is not in winning the soul of an Enterprise 2.0 that in two years will be displaced by Enterprise 3.0, and then by Enterprise 4.0, and then by whatever meme can be devised to name the new software generation that replaces it.
So, if the social media movement is looking for a war with somebody for “the soul of Enterprise 2.0,” perhaps it should look to other IT movements such as the Semantic Web movement or the Intelligent Agent movement, or the SOA movement, or the Software as a Service movement (SAAS). As for KM, its cultural conflicts are with centralized command-and-control forms of management, Business Process Engineering, and other movements concerned with how collectives should organize their functioning, not with software movements producing tools it can use.