How do you ‘can’ a Jedi master? How do you store the collective learnings of the organization? Why did we win that sale? What have we built somewhere else before? What did that design look like? We can take a relational database, slice it, dice it, and cut it, rotate those cubes, and do data mining. But in the end, the difference is what really animates an organization is a human being.”

These are questions put forth in an interview I had several years ago with Allan Frank, chief technology officer for AnswerThink Consulting Group Atlanta and formerly national partner-in-charge of enabling technologies for KPMG Peat Marwick LLP. As Allan so aptly put it, knowledge management has always been a confounding issue for organizations seeking to better digitize, if you will, their collective knowledge. All too often, huge pieces of that collective learning have walked out the door to other organizations or to retirement.

Now, of course, we see social networking as a way to organically capture an assemble that collective knowledge, both within and outside the enterprise walls. But how is the more informal, almost free-for-all social networking approach meshing with more formal efforts to capture and leverage knowledge?

Xerox researcher Venkatesh G. Rao, said that the emerging tension between social media and knowledge management is a “generational war,” with younger participants opting for Web 2.0-ish approaches, versus the command-and-control nature of knowledge management systems.

However, in a post responding to Venkatesh’s observation, Tony Baer called the idea of generational war, at least here, as “hogwash.” As Tony observes, Web 2.0 isn’t wasted on the young: “Twittering, Facebook et al tend to hit more of a younger demographic, but use of Web 2.0 tools is definitely not restricted to people under 30.”

In fact, social media is being embraced with a lot of gusto by end users of all generations. “There have been many of us around for years who have always contributed “folk” knowledge, but until recently lacked the tools to share it.”

There are distinct differences between conventional knowledge management approaches as we’ve known them and social media, however. Tony points to parallels with the software development world. “Conventional knowledge management is more of a waterfall process [one department hands off work to another], whereas social media tends to be more agile [working collaboratively, real-time].”  In other words, conventional knowledge management systems have been top-down mega-projects, versus the more grassroots, democratic nature of social media.

As Tony puts it. the rise of social networking introduces a new dimension to the art and science of knowledge management:

“The question is whether you do so in a carefully organized top down fashion or instead encourage a culture of more informal or organic knowledge sharing. There’s no single silver bullet that works, but what’s always disturbed us have been those top-down enterprise knowledge management projects that to us appeared as little more than make work for highly paid enterprise consultants…. Along came Web 2.0 and social media which provided new technologies for the grassroots to simply not wait for some project manager to start a harvesting session which is then converted into retrievable assets from some application requiring significant custom coding. Instead, the notion of Wikis, blogs, microblogs, chats, forums and so on is to use the right tool for the purpose as the purpose arises. Some call it fun. We’ve thought of the new social media as the next generation Knowledge Management.”