The War Between Knowledge Management and Social Media

Brent Schlenker identifies an important article from Social Computing Magazine (online), that suggests that there is a war between those older managers who believe in knowledge management (KM) approaches and those, mostly younger, workers who freely use social media (SM) to transmit and receive knowledge throughout their organizations and beyond. In the article, Venkatesh Rao writes, “…the most hilarious part is that most of the combatants don’t even realize they are in a war.” It’s a long article, so let me give you the headings and let you read the details for yourself:

1. In this war, Boomers favor KM while Millenials favor SM. GenXers are currently neutral.

2. KM is about ideology, SM is about the fun of building.

3. The Boomers don’t really get or like engineering and organizational complexity.

4. The Millenials don’t really try to understand the world.

5. Boomers speak with words, X’ers with numbers, Millenials with actions.

The war is being fought along technological fronts, with these dimensions:

1. Expertise locators are not social networks.

2. Online Communities are not USENET V3.0

3. RSS and Mash-ups are Gen-X ideas.

4. SemWeb (“semantic web”) Isn’t Next-Gen, it is Last-Gen.

5. SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and SaaS (Software as a Service) are Gen X; Clouds are Millenial.

The last section of the article is entitled “How the War Will End”. I could tell you, but that would spoil the ending for you.

However, when you read the article, come back and discuss it here. (GW)

Social Media vs. Knowledge Management – I totally missed this | Corporate eLearning Strategies and Development | Brent Schlenker | 4 December 2008

Tagged as: generational issues, Knowledge Management, Social Media