Harvard Business Publishing

For those in the oil and gas industry, the revolution is at http://innovation-in-oil-and-gas.blogspot.com

I agree we won't see a revolution, at least not in this generation of executives and pop management thinkers, but in 50 years we will experience a more Folletian science and practice of management which will be realized thanks to new technology. Or maybe that's only me who thinks that way.

Revolutions are less about WHAT changes, and more about a change WHO controls an environment. The role of a technology in this process can be very important, but it is questionable weather this revolution will cause any meaningful change in a way enterprise and/or market functions.

I think the Knowledge Management under delivered, not because of the limitations of tools it has used or accessibility of the content, but because the content was never integrated into a business process flow. Most humans do not acquire knowledge outside of a context of their life's.

The goal of Knowledge Management movement was to capture and preserve the tacit knowledge of domain experts and to externalize these ‘best practices’ for application by others. It was an attempt to exploit the implicit value of the Intellectual Capital of the enterprise. It did not deliver on these goals for several reasons including an underestimation of the scope and complexity of the problem and the relatively weak technology applied to the problem. The main reason however was simply the cost of extracting and organizing the expert knowledge was disproportionately expensive to the value derived by the Enterprise from the output.

While the Social Computing approach to Enterprise 2.0 can deliver some value in the tactical sense of exploiting the ‘long tail’ of peripheral knowledge, or giving people a sense of empowerment through the democratized access methods or the immediacy of some of the communication methods, it does little to solve the more difficult (and ultimately more valuable) objectives of Knowledge Management. In fact it can do a great disservice in this regard by increasing the noise to signal ratio with internal communications (something I have witnessed over and over again). One problem is simply that the people whose input would be most valued have the least amount of free time to contribute. They are too busy accomplishing the tasks at hand. This is just another flavor of the original failure of Knowledge Management. All that has happened is that the role of the Knowledge Engineer has been removed from a third party and placed upon the shoulder of the Domain Expert. When you look at the use of Enterprise 2.0 tools for strategic initiatives (particularly the notion of the ‘wisdom of the masses’), they are poorly suited to the way these kinds of things get done. These methods of collaboration and communication provide nothing to exploit the ‘wisdom of the experts’ and support the privacy and security routinely required to accomplish this kind of work. Enterprise 2.0 is incrementally evolutionary at best but certainly not revolutionary.

The concept of social computing is a pheonmenon of democratization. Like any democracy, there is going to be the need of an executive that controls and guides the energies of the common public. However at the same time the participation of the public in terms of opinions, feedback does influence the decision making of the executives. So the process of democratization of enterprise 2.0 will be build around the same principles where opinions, perspectives shall be an integral part of executive decision making. It may appear that the process may be more time consuming but once it becomes a natural part of the process, the flow will allow for continuous evolution of the enterprise and for the first time it will be participative and not dictatorial and or consensus constrained.

Enterprise 2.0 is all about creating insight, not mere intelligence. I believe that this began with Knowledge Management which focused on unlocking data and gaining greater intelligence. But Enterprise 2.0 is more than this. As companies deploy more social networking tools like wikis, blogs, and other collaboration tools, these are the water cooler conversations of old, the place where new ideas and innovations can be shared and promoted. Business today is globally distributed, highly competitive, and data intensive. Enterprise 2.0 provides a platform for ideas to flourish in this environment, allowing companies to start with knowledge and intelligence and create insight and innovation. This is where competitive advantage can be gained in today's economy.

E 2.0 is a tool to capture and store multi-format information but there it ends. Someone has to subjectively decide what is important and what is not, someone has to spend the time creating, editing, filtering, and presenting this information. Is this knowledge, or a subjective opinion of what is important to this person? Is E 2.0 is a solution to make up for Agile developments shortcomings or another time waster?

By making it more open and more socially accessible, more eyes and thought decide what is important and where development should go. This removes the subjectivity of the lone knoweldge gather of KM 1.0. A herd principle is formed but behind it all there has to be opinion formers, once the direction is given the masses moves the project forward.

We all know the herd principle leads to sloppiness, assumptions taken and unbalance. I see E 2.0 used as a tool to make up for the shortcomings of Agile development where documentation isn't important as many iterations iron out the prior problems but all this takes time and in the long run it might have been better to follow a structured format!!!!

Coming from an industry of IT practitioners and having led the IT group for a $ 4 bn organization, I have a reasonable ability to differentiate truth from hype....and I share Tom's healthy skepticism about software being the cause of revolutions, real or imagined. I am convinced that IT is just a cost of doing business and nothing more....of course, it delivers enormous benfits in operational efficiency, productivity etc but only at a huge cost. Neither KM nor other forms of software ( V 2.0 or higher) can truly capture the complexity of businesses. Software to send a rocket into space is of an order of complexity many degrees higher than an ERP package but the crucial difference is that a space shuttle's complexity is programmable. Business is not programmable and hence not codifiable. That is the reason why there is a such a big gap between a 'blueprinted process' and the 'actual practice of that process'. Maybe sometime in the future, when artifical intelligence based software mimics the way accountants, HR folks, sales people, general managers think and act, IT would finally prove its worth.

On the practical side of social applications, I've learned that they work best - capturing, sharing, and tracking important yet informal information. The kind that is not organized or reused but tends to get lost in email and conversations.

Content can be both structured and unstructured as well as support multiple formats (text, video, images).

Oh, and let's not forget about some of the great content (see Mr. Davenport's favs - on the right) available on the net via rss and xml. Surely, social bookmarks and blogs from external sources can left the enterprise IQ.

Most managers have never posted or commented on a blog or used any of the new customer IT applications. They will never know the power unless they spend some quality time using them - just reading about them is bs.

jim
www.advancinginsights.com

What is KM, anyway? All this talk about "KM vs. E2.0" is confusing - this blogger, for example, highlights that there at least 43 definitions of KM out there in theory-land:

http://blog.simslearningconnections.com/?p=279

Tom, can you provide a solid working definition of KM so we can contrast it with E2.0 (and have Andy provide a definition of what E2.0 actually consists of?)

Thx!

While I thoroughly appreciate the discussion on the advancements in the field of KM, I was more drawn to the philosophical question raised with respect to the proclamation of revolutions.

In my opinion, generally speaking it is this very drive that brings people and companies forward, and generates the majority of incremental change experienced everywhere - we all are in search of greatness. The bottom line is that it's a game of the numbers.

Revolution is measured by impact and as such does not possess some intrinsic value upon creation. What's more - and therefore my specific interest in the "drive" mentioned above - in order to harness the revolutionary capabilities of evolution, we need to acknowledge that what we're really looking at is "change", and that the distinction between evolution and revolution occurs at a different level. At the basis of any change, be it evolutionary or revolutionary, lies evolutionary change. Einstein didn't wake up being a genius, it was an entire chain of internal changes - partially brought about by external change - that led him to express his ideas and consequently revolutionize the world. Simultaneously this example demonstrates the popular conviction that change is an interplay of internal and external systems.

Coming back to the issue of knowledge management, the previous discussion finds relevance in the fact that both user and inventor must "operate" in tandem to warrant the revolutionary aspect of any KM system. Taking an easy shortcut to long-term perspective, one could say that future generations will become increasingly apt at sharing knowledge - as has happened with more recent generations - hence increasing the utility of the system. And voilà, there are the aspects of impact and interdependence.

A hundred years into the future, people may look back and see a number of generations struggling with KM, only to proclaim it a revolution when viewed over several decades. From a philosophical perspective, what matters is not the definition, but the perspective. For managers it's all about realizing what can be changed, when and how.

My humble advice to you then is to realize the different levels of discussion and focus on the one relevant for your purposes. Managers, however, would be wise to consider the levers in the chain, now and in the future. Practicing your skill to dissect these layers will allow you to more clearly shape a vision of the future and develop, communicate and pursue appropriate scenarios. Before you know it, without clouded judgment, you are the very person proclaiming the next revolution.

Thanks for your thought-provoking article and comments.

I have been in the information technology field since its humble beginning and major step along its developmental path has always been hyped as revolutionary. What if E2.0 is just simply the logical progression of the convergence of hardware and software capabilities today? As I compose this on a laptop I bought at the beginning of the year I am reminded of all the other computers I have owned with meager RAM, software, and storage. This machine allows me to do much more and therefore I want to do more and IT has a way of always meeting the challenge for those of us who can't get enough. It pleases me no end to use these new adaptations of technology no matter what we call it. Oh, and we must remember that radical titles sell.

Enterprise 2.0 is the latest technology evolution and, like all the previous ones, I welcome it. PCs, Spreadsheets, Databases, the Internet... they each revolutionised the way that we work. A continuing thread throughout this progress is that they are no substitute for judgement and good analysis.

The same objectives for creating a long tail of commuincation could be achieved through previous technologies with a bit of organisation and co-operation but turning it into actionable ideas requires an additional something.

Enterprise 2.0 will help the people and companies who are doing the right theings to do them better but will not transform ugly ducklings into swans. Let's hope that the technology debate doesn't distract us from the information overload that seems to the common complaint across businesses.