Sure, there are a few differences between classical KM and E2.0. The tools are largely different, for one. Perhaps the most important difference is the emphasis on emergence of content structures in E2.0, rather than specifying them in advance, as early knowledge managers had to. But I’ve always felt that most information environments require some mixture of structure and emergence. Social networking and its various technology platforms will be critical in pushing KM to the masses.

Like I said above good post on the nexus of Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, and KM 2.0.

Forrester offers a model for Information Workplaces:
http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/0,7211,42796,00.html

It seems we are agreeing to disagree because of some of our positions and perspectives (hey, welcome to the human race

Maybe we can all agree on this …

Knowledge work is changing a lot due to easier and lightweight tools and services that help people exchange information and construct useful knowledge in near-real-time, and it will change even more over the next few years due to 10 enhanced collaborative capabilities and 2) an ongoing rise in the number of tech-savvy and web-savvy younger workers.

The ease of use that Web 2.0 tools and services has brought to the party is critical. So too is an intelligent architecture of heavier-weight IT capabilities such as comprehensive databases benefiting from comprehensive taxonomies, sophisticated enterprise search, 2nd or 3rd gen document management, and so on …

Let’s call it … I dunno … Work 2.0 ? That, incidentally (as most of you probably know) is what IBM calls “this new playing field”, as people like Rod Smith, their global VP of Emerging Technology, move around talking with the large companies that are or may become IBM’s clients.

I do take issue with this: “KM needs to rethink fundamental aspects”

There is no spoon…

KM = Pink Elephant, ok I’ll go for Wooly Mammoth. It ‘did’ exist at one time. Now, there is just the echo of voices resonnating the past.

That’s a great post Jon and this is a great conversation we have here. A good example of what a blog offers: it helps us grow!

I’ve read “I am still at a loss as to what is uniquely KM and to what purpose it serves that is not already served by established disciplines” in a comment and like Jon I would like to say a word.
If people got it 10 years ago, you’ll probably get it today Paula.

You are right Paula when you say that elements of KM were already in place before KM. The reason why is that KM is not about tools, it is about how we understand what is important in value creation. For ages the answer was muscle sweat and a lot of people think that way despite most advanced economies are 80% based on services today. With this new reality, some people have started thinking differently: maybe it is not muscle swear. So what then? Brain juice. We now understand that the value creation is made with brain juice. We call this a Knowledge Economy. Baker wrote some good stuff back in the 60′.

KM is one trend, among quality management, reengineering, communities of practice and Enterprise 2.0, that helps us implement a knowledge-based economy. “What you can’t measure, you can’t manage”. Because knowledge is implicit, we have to explicit it to manage it. We need to rematerialize. KM did a good job by documenting and referencing knowledge. We have created some massive knowledge bases.

The biggest database is by far the web. The massive uses of tools enabling web content production, blogs, wikis and social bookmarks, contributed to an explosion of content. By doing so people were initially formalizing and referencing knowledge. Like before. But it was personal knowledge, subjective information that were sitting a click away from each other. This generates controversy and conversations in between websites. Comments appeared to make it more comfortable and relevant. They concentrate in one place, more than allow, conversations. That exactly where the shift is : from documentation to conversation. The social layer is now in place and we just see its beginning.

With this shift, there is another shift happening. We change both our conception of knowledge management and knowledge itself. We now concentrate on knowledge sharing and we understand knowledge differently.

When it comes to defining knowledge, one can distinguishes three dialectics: Explicit vs Tacit, Ontological vs Contextual and Private vs Public. The first one is based on the physical status of knowledge, the second one on its epistemological status and the third one on its economical status.

In the KM era ‘Explicit – Ontological – Private’ understanding prevails. That is the reason why there are many processes (explicitation), data (ontology) and egoist ‘knowledge is Power’ behaviors. This later is the reason why KM fails.
Social computing is based on a radically different ground i.e. ‘tacit, contextual and public’; and Stowe Boyd one of its prominent spokesperson. In an organization, existing implementations show that social computing is altered in explicitable, contextual and collective to be compatible and successful.

So personally I don’t see the point of “saying if 10 years ago…”. It’s gone and some necessary work has been done back then. We now work on a different level. We try to work on present knowledge, not past knowledge. We try to materialize conversations, knowledge on the go. ECM focuses on the result: a document. Enterprise 2.0 tools focus on the journey between the idea generation and idea formalization. In between what you have there is individual and collective work : reflexion and conversation. Enterprise 2.0 tools capture, at the very same time they enable, conversations. And in a much more efficient way than emails, distributed by nature, as centralized in one place (a blog, a wiki). You now have knowledge management on the go.

This is a different stuff and a different organization. While KM was regarded as a specific job, with a specific team who has specific expertise, it is now dispersed throughout the organization as embedded in operational processes. There is no KM anymore because it is just everywhere.
In fact KM is still here and keep on doing the very same stuff. But what happens now with knowledge sharing is not often the responsibility of the KM team. Knowledge Managers have to rethink their understanding of what is knowledge before they go down the road of Enterprise 2.0 projects and implementations. They don’t have to deal with data and documents, they have to deal with people. Only now Drucker’s “Managing knowledge is managing people” is operationally meaningful to KM people. Before only HR and enlightened managers got it.

So Jon, I think HR certainly needs a lifting but probably not a “massive transformation”. KM needs to rethink fundamental aspects, HR needs to put more “social” in its process. We need to stop this over focus on individual performance and appraisal and start evaluating, encouraging and rewarding the collaborative side of any employee action. Individual appraisals is the principal source for the “knowledge is power” understanding and the principal reason for KM-related strategies to fail and corporate under-performance.
“Self organization” along with “corporate democracy” were two popular trends in the 70′ that failed. We need hierarchy, but we need different one. Not a “command and control”, old school thing inherited from the Army. We need a hierarchy that favors individual initiative, personal commitment and open collaboration. HR is key in designing the process and the managerial discourse (Greenleaf is back!) … and Enterprise social computing (aka Enterprise 2.0) delivers the tools to make it work.

In this respect, “how to create a knowledge sharing culture?” and “what you can do to encourage and facilitate connections?” are identical questions. It’s just a different angle. The reason I see for considering they are distinct lays in the fact that no one internally, or externally (see http://venividiluxi.com/en/?p=50) today has the skills and resources to address them globally.