Oh good grief… « Enlightened tradition

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I think I am grateful to Mary Abraham for pointing me in the direction of Venkatesh Rao’s densely argued article opposing knowledge management and social media. In fact, it made me as despondent as Charlie Brown faced with yet another opportunity to kick Lucy’s football. This is not a generational war: it is a battle of the straw men. Mary has already dealt deftly with the supposed distinction between KM and Web2.0. What about the straw men?
Defining knowledge management
Venkat characterises KM as a “venerable IT-based social engineering discipline.” IT-based? Dave Snowden was right: we have lost the battle to define KM in other than technology terms. That said, many of us who take seriously the duty to define KM properly do so primarily by reference to people, rather than technology.
Venkat goes on to present a range of crude stereotypes of KM activities:
“KM is about ideology”
Expertise location is about a yearning for a “priestly elite”
“KM and SemWeb set a lot of store by controlled vocabularies and ontologies as drivers of IT architecture”
Some of the detail of Venkat’s argument is good, although he appears to have met some pretty scary knowledge managers. My response to some of his examples (and experiences) was to wonder how much was driven by particular corporate cultures. But Venkat attributes almost all o

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http://blog.tarn.org/2008/10/10/oh-good-grief/

http://blog.tarn.org/2008/10/10/oh-good-grief/