I don’t think it was as a result of Andrew’s presentation at the recent FASTForward 08 conference, but may have been related to the recent Enterprise 2.0 / KM discussion reported on this blog involving Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee, moderated by colleague Jim McGee.

David Gurteen reports in his most recent newsletter that Tom Davenport has agreed to understand that social software and social computing has a growing and perhaps central role in the ongoing evolution of knowledge work.  This is news because it was, I believe, beginning to seem as if Davenport was becoming a somewhat curmudgeonly holdout against a growing consensus that wikis, blogs and social computing are having a clear impact on the nature of knowledge work and the "management" off socially-constructed just-in-time knowledge.

As a general assertion, I think it’s fair to say that social computing is bringing new capabilities and capacity to the (interactive) construction of just-in-time knowledge in an environment characterized by ongoing flows of information

Tom Davenport quoted in the Gurteen Knowledge newsletter:

.

" Still, that E2.0 is the new KM didn’t hit me for a while. But when Andy said the ultimate value of E2.0 initiatives consists of greater responsiveness, better "knowledge capture and sharing",  and more effective "collective intelligence", there wasn’t much doubt. When he talked about the need for a willingness to share and a helpful attitude, I remembered all the times over the past 15 years I’d heard that about KM."

and later

"I admit to a mild hostility to the hype around Enterprise 2.0 in the past. I have reacted in a curmudgeonly fashion to what smelled like old wine in new bottles. But I realized after hearing Andy talk that he was an ally, not a competitor. If E2.0 can give KM a mid-life kicker, so much the better. If a new set of technologies can bring about a knowledge-sharing culture, more power to them. Knowledge management was getting a little tired anyway."

.

Actually, it’s not fair to say that Tom Davenport "has agreed to understand" …. it’s more fair to say that the context in which terminology and jargon are being used has become clearer to him and more commonly shared amongst participants in (an important) conversation.

It seems clear to me that "Enterprise 2.0" is here to stay … the clearest signal to date is the raft of changes made over the past two or three years to the mainstream offerings of the biggest workplace productivity vendors to enable many forms of collaboration, combined with acquisitions, strategic alliances with innovative smaller E2.0 players and the beginning moves by the major consulting firms (such as publishing white papers, surveys and research reports) to pay attention to the emerging Enterprise 2.0 field.

I believe that social computing in the workplace will lead to the re-design of the fundamental principles of knowledge work.  Dave Snowden is a well-known KM guru who has said as much in a podcast created several months ago wherein I asked him about the likely impacts of Web 2.0 on knowledge work and knowledge management. 

Here’s a link to that podcast, wherein in my opinion Dave holds forth on the coming changes to the design and dynamics of knowledge work in a particularly clear and coherent manner.

Dave Snowden is also fond of saying that "one should not throw the baby out with the bathwater" … and in the context of this post I think it’s useful to note that one of the happy outcomes of our growing understanding of the Enterprise 2.0 field is that the advent of using wikis and blogs and widgets and social computing inside the firewall does not mean that all the thinking, theorizing and implementation of initiatives related to KM 1.0 needs to be tossed away.  Rather it seems that much of what has gone before can be built upon and enhanced, and notably in the areas of cultural adaptation and changes to management practices.

Indeed, I (and my co-author Jim Bair) have tried to reflect these emerging perspectives in a just-published industry book titled "Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of Web 2.0" - (ARK Group UK), recently given an initial once-over on this blog by colleague Bill Ives, wherein I cite Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Dave Snowden, Dion Hinchcliffe, Ikujiro Nonaka and a number of other well-known KM theorists and practitioners.  I like to believe that the book’s content has struck an initial balance between the complex taxonomies of many organizations’ accumulated "knowledge", the large investments made over the past decade to enterprise information architecture, many workers’ need for some structure and direction and the clear power of more organic social computing carried out by interconnected individuals with a wide range of styles when it comes to cognition, learning and ways to turn pertinent information into useful knowledge.

I also think it’s clear that we are all going to be learning a lot more about the design, dynamics and management of knowledge work over the next several years.  It will never be left to be completely organic - free-flowing, self-assembling and emergent.  Humans are tinkerers, especially in a technocratic era and even more so those of such an era who are bent on having organizations perform more and better.  They will always be looking for ways to make knowledge and knowledge work more effective and more profitable. 

FASTForward 08 made that clear.

Powered by Qumana