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This discussion of John Tropea’s two blog entries of March 17th<\/a> and 18th 2008<\/a>, has turned into a series within a series. I guess that’s a measure of what happens in this blog medium. That is, if you feel like saying more about something, there’s always another blog tomorrow. No one can tell you that you’ve got too many pages! This one will cover John’s treatment of KM 2.0 in his presentation on KM 2.0<\/a>.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n John does this in four slides. In those slides KM 2.0 is characterized as \u201csocial computing.\u201d The tools identified are wikis, blogs, social networking software, and tag clouds. Wikis are seen as collaborations, shared spaces, with a sense of place. They’re seen as a gateway to the best in the Document Management System, and as relieving the over-use of e-mail.<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Blogs are viewed as providing a sense of place, easy to create unstructured free-form content, a place to make comments, to editorialize in an informal way, to develop a work in progress in fragments rather than as a finished product, as working with a subscribe model, providing a trusted social filter, providing news for one another, and as providing a centralized searchable archive.<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Social networking software includes: profile pages, subscription capability, private\/public messages, a home for blogs, support for communities, expertise locator, support for querying the network, public bookmarks and link blogging, and presence awareness and micro-blogging.<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n As I mentioned in my first post<\/a> on John’s blogs, he distinguishes his notion of \u201cthe New KM,\u201d from KM 2.0, which he characterizes as \u201csocial computing.\u201d I think this distinction is good because it distinguishes the tools from KM itself, at least to some degree. Thus, social computing, or KM 2.0, is only one aspect of his \u201cnew KM,\u201d which is conceptualized as an ecological system, rather than as an activity, a class of activities, or a discipline. On the other hand, the view of KM as an ecological system clearly conflates one of the outcomes of successful KM and knowledge processing with KM as something we do, an activity or class of activities. So, let’s now distinguish a) KM, b) the ecological system which we might view as the longer term systemic goal of KM, and c) the software tools of social computing. Now, let’s address the question of the impact of the introduction of social computing tools into organizations.<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n After presenting the KM 2.0 tools, John talks about anticipated impacts, including:<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n — increased chance of \u201cbumping into somebody in the coffee room by infinity,\u201d<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n — enabling tuning \u201cinto a knowledge flow,\u201d<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n — increasing the number of people you trust,<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n — providing high abstraction communication at \u201csimilar wavelengths,\u201d<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n — increasing distribution of contributions to content and increasing transparency,<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n — increasing the number of weak social ties cutting across the hierarchy that can tie one into relevant information relatively quickly,<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n — creating greater frequency of communications cutting across the organizational hierarchy,<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n — increases in networking effects due to aggregation of widely distributed information, and<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n — increases in emergent patterns of content and self-organization.<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n He also points out that apart from the need for facilitators to support communities, there is no KM here, because people are just working by themselves in a social way.<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Let’s consider the last point first, doesn’t the view that KM 2.0 can be done \u201cwithout KM\u201d assume that the network of blogs, wikis, and social networking tools that is KM 2.0 can function in enterprises without any regulation or maintenance? Doesn’t it assume that a kind of unregulated free marketplace of ideas will function smoothly without the need for management intervention? Is that reasonable? What about software updates? What about cultural norms to prevent the social exchanges from tending toward extreme conflict? What about cultural norms and interaction rules to prevent the development of communitarian conformity<\/a> in informal social interactions? What about development of rules for knowledge claim evaluation? What happens if the rules that develop in the emergent patterns are authoritarian? Is there anything in \u201cKM 2.0\u201d to prevent that from occurring? What about encouraging the development of new ideas in the new exchange networks? Can laissez-faire ensure originality, or should knowledge managers introduce other processes to supplement KM 2.0 tools and to encourage people to \u201cthink outside the box.\u201d<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Granted, that KM 2.0 tools are useful in helping people to get more involved in exchanging knowledge claims and even in collaborating in this task, and more generally. But once having helped the enterprise by helping to introduce these tools, is the work of Knowledge Managers really done, or is this just an appeal to return KM to the good old days when it was all done so very well informally, without benefit of even a name? Forgive me, but I think that doesn’t work. However good our knowledge processing in an organization may appear it is only “good” relative to the knowledge processing of one’s most competent competitor. It’s the job of KM to ensure that the adaptive\/problem solving capacity of one’s organization is sufficient to cope with the challenges presented by the organization’s environment. To the extent that capacity falls short, or may fall short in the future, It’s very important for an organization to ensure that its knowledge processing is of higher quality than that of its competitors.<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Now let’s analyze the relationship of John’s claimed KM 2.0 impacts to enhanced knowledge processing.<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n — increased chance of \u201cbumping into somebody in the coffee room by infinity\u201d<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n <\/p>\n