Cover story: Debunking conjecture of a KM v. SM cultural war

Sometimes incorrect knowledge ignites truth. And so it is with an erroneous blog that has led to the clarification of the relationship between KM and SM.

In a noted blog in the fall of 2008, Venkatesh Rao makes a number of claims about the relationship between the Knowledge Management (KM) and Social Media (SM) movements.
He:

Characterises KM as a “venerable IT-based social engineering discipline”;
Characterises KM “as a top-down boomer (1946-62) management effort”;
Claims that “KM and SM are locked in an undeclared cultural war for the soul of Enterprise 2.0”.

In support of his ideas, Rao presents some anecdotes illustrating three conflicts between people who identify their work as KM work and himself. After assuming the truth of his conjecture that there is a culture war between KM and SM, he explains this war is due to generational conflicts between ‘boomer’ and “millenial’ generations.

KM/SM war news to me
Is there really a war between KM and SM? It’s news to me and also to others in KM. My overwhelming impression, in fact, is that people practising KM are favourable to SM and Enterprise 2.0. So the conjecture that there’s a war between SM and KM led me to attempt my own analysis of the issue.
I’ll present that analysis, and then finish by commenting on Rao’s claims. My approach will be to offer definitions of KM and SM, and a bit of context for these definitions, and then characterise the KM/SM relationship. I take this approach, not because I like definitions, but because I want you to be able to evaluate my conjectures based on mutual understanding of terms. How can you do that if you don’t have a good idea about what I mean?

KM: a single meme, multiple meanings and a heterogeneous movement
People often view KM as a much more homogeneous field than it in fact is. They think that ‘KM’ means something very specific and well known. But one of the first things anyone reviewing KM literature learns is that beyond having something to do with non-directive managerial activities aimed at indirectly improving the quality of decision making through improving the quality of knowledge, the meaning of KM can vary wildly across a broad spectrum of ideas.
The results of a recent survey by Ray Sims reported 43 KM definitions, which soon grew to 60 aided by comments. Stephen Bounds performed an evaluation of Sims’ results when the list had grown to 53 definitions. Bounds’ analysis showed great variety in the concepts people used to define KM.
This and earlier surveys of KM definitions suggest the state of affairs in KM is that:

there is a broad measure of disagreement about what its core is;
‘KM’ has many meanings, and also
KM is a heterogeneous, rather than a homogeneous, movement.

I’ll use the following definition of KM in my analysis of the KM/SM relationship:

KM is the set of activities and processes aimed at enhancing knowledge processing, where knowledge processing includes: problem seeking, recognition, and formulation; knowledge production (i.e. knowledge creation, knowledge discovery, and knowledge making); and knowledge integration.

This definition is unique in making a distinction between KM and knowledge processing activity. The scope and boundary problems of KM are alleviated by the definition, because KM starts and stops with a much narrower class of activities than implied by other definitions, which are clearly management activities targeted at enhancing knowledge processing.
Most other definitions, also, conflate ‘managing’ and ‘doing,’ and/or ‘managing’ and ‘learning,’ and/or ‘managing’ and ‘sharing,’ or ‘knowledge’ and ‘information,’ or assume that static products can be directly, rather than indirectly, managed through processes that create, change or destroy them.

Social media
The proliferation of definitions and conceptions surrounding ‘SM’ doesn’t rival KM yet, but the ambiguity surrounding it is already appreciable. A recent but still incomplete cataloging of definitions of SM by Benedikt Koehler numbered 23 distinct definitions. These range from virtual synonyms of the term social software, to those that make no reference to software at all.
In its modern context –

‘social media’ is associated with software tools that support social interaction and provide (to quote Brian Solis) “for the democratisation of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism to a many-to-many model, rooted in conversations between authors, people, and peers.”

Part of this definition associates SM with the use of software tools in order to generate media content and intense social interactions.

The relationship
The relationship between SM tools and KM is simply that KM may frequently find useful instruments for enhancing knowledge processing and therefore may want to introduce them into organisations.

SM tools enable increased: social networking, connectivity, distributed content creation and aggregation, self-organisation, and collaboration. They may, also, if introduced into a social system, enhance aspects of knowledge processing including problem seeking, recognition and formulation; creating new knowledge; and knowledge integration. And that’s why KM may want to introduce SM tools or support others in introducing them.

The democratisation of content production in the context of more intense social interaction, promised and, arguably, produced by SM tools, is something that KM should seek and support.

That is, both more intense social interaction, and distributed and more participatory content production, can lead to the growth of better quality information and knowledge. Since one of the most important goals of KM is to grow higher quality knowledge, KM ought to be – and, I think is – friendly to the idea of SM.
The amount and nature of enhancements resulting from using SM tools is heavily dependent on the context of applying the tools in question. And in each KM case, it’s necessary to assess what the impact of an SM tool introduction will be, and how it relates to the larger context of what one is trying to accomplish.
KM initiatives should use SM tools in ways that are mindful of the need to apply them so that improvements in the area of seeing problems and evaluating potential solutions keep pace with the growth of alternative solutions and information and knowledge sharing; that is the promise of the SM movement.
The operative notion here, once again, is that the relationship between KM and these tools is always contextual and must be analysed. It should not be assumed there is a necessarily beneficial relationship between SM tools and KM; but, on the other hand, there may well be a beneficial one, if the context is right.

Deconstructing the KM/SM Culture War
Obviously, I don’t think there’s a culture war between KM and SM, at least not on the KM side. Since, that’s the case, I won’t comment on Rao’s generational explanation of “the culture war”, since there’s no need to do that unless it can first be shown to exist.
Rao doesn’t say much about what he means by either ‘KM’ or ‘SM,’ but simply assumes that his readers will understand what he means. This is problematic. If readers want to evaluate his conjecture, they do need to understand what it is he is saying. They need to determine whether or not, from their point of view (and assuming that there is a culture war), he is proposing a KM vs. SM culture war, or an Information Management (IM) vs. SM culture war, or perhaps an IM vs. Enterprise 2.0 culture war, or perhaps a centralised IT vs. social software culture war, or any of the other culture wars that might account for his anecdotes.
What he does say about what he means by KM doesn’t give one a lot of confidence that he is talking about anything close to the notion of KM I’m writing about here.
Specifically, is KM a “venerable IT-based social engineering discipline”, as Rao says? As Michael Novak, a KM practitioner, comments on Rao’s blog: “Just like the Holy Roman Empire was not holy, not Roman, and not an empire, KM is not venerable, not IT-based, and not about “social engineering” (whatever that is).”
So, if Rao does view it as a “venerable IT-based social engineering discipline”, Novak’s comment suggests that “the thing” that is at war with SM is not either the KM that Novak practices, or the KM that I’ve been writing about for the past 11 years and is defined in this article. How about KM as a ‘top down’ management effort? Is that a viable notion?
My first involvement in formal KM in 1997 came because I was working with the idea of distributed knowledge management systems. That’s why one of my websites is named dkms.com. Moreover, KM became prominent partly in reaction to BPR which was a top-down movement. And one of the things KM emphasised from the beginning (see Karl Wiig’s early work) was the value of people and of bottom-up community.
Finally, people in KM have been working with bottom-up ideas coming out of complexity theory since at least the early ’90s, and these were very popular long before the coming of the SM movement.
I do think that if a “venerable IT-based social engineering” and “top down” discipline exists, that it would have a serious cultural conflict with the social media movement, and even that it might be locked in an undeclared cultural war for the soul of Enterprise 2.0. However, I think if there is such a discipline, its name is Information Engineering, or perhaps IT itself, but it is not ‘KM’.
Rao responded to Novak’s comment with this: “The very urge to frame debates according to canonical definitions is a KM way… ”
This may or may not be true, but its truth is not relevant here, is it? The issue is whether we need to know what ‘KM’ is according to Rao, in order to evaluate his claim about “the culture war.” Clearly, we do. His claim that it is an IT-based, top-down social engineering discipline (forget about the “venerable”) opposed to the use of SM/Enterprise 2.0 tools – with their emphasis on creating distributed collaboration, communication, content creation, self-organisation and community – provides no confidence that his assertion is true from the viewpoint of other, more accepted, meanings of KM.
Rao claims that “in practice KM is IT-based and about ’social engineering’”. I think this is false. We could empirically test it, but only after he tells us what he means by the vague terms “IT-based” and “social engineering”. Very few KM practitioners will agree that KM is primarily about introducing IT tools of any generation. Put simply, that is IE or IT, or IM, not KM.
Rao says: “You don’t get to define what KM is based on your sense of what it ought to be”. That’s true, but in an emerging discipline where there is such great disagreement over its core concerns, and where KM may be many, many things, much of which will not be viewed as KM when the discipline does come to greater agreement on basics, Rao, also doesn’t get to define what KM is, based on his sense of what it ought to be in order to advance the narrative that there is a culture war between ‘KM’ and ‘SM’ for “the soul of Enterprise 2.0.”
Rao’s very phraseology suggests that his view of KM is at variance with the view held by KM practitioners. After all, what is Enterprise 2.0? According to McAfee it is: “. . . the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”.
But why should KM care about ‘the soul’ of that? Why should KM practitioners fight with anyone about that? What is any X.0 version of the Enterprise to us? We are agnostic about such IT things. We use them when they fit, and use other tools and procedures when they don’t.
Our interest is in improving the adaptive capability of the complex adaptive systems we call organisations, and also in our own personal adaptive capability. It is in growing high quality knowledge, and also in making sure that the information and knowledge previously generated in our collectives is available to people who need it to do their jobs, and to solve problems, as they see those jobs and those problems.
It is in building organisations that learn better, and that meet challenges better, and that distribute knowledge processing and knowledge better. But it is not in winning the soul of an Enterprise 2.0 that in two years will be displaced by Enterprise 3.0, and then by Enterprise 4.0, and then by whatever meme can be devised to name the new software generation that replaces it.
KM practitioners need to be open to, but agnostic about, software tools, generally. There’s no place for evangelism about them. Evangelism is about faith. But knowledge management is about enhancing knowledge processing in order to enhance adaptive capability.
For KM, that’s all that counts.

Joe Firestone is managing director and CEO of Knowledge Management Consortium International, US [http://www.kmci.org/]. Contact: eisai@comcast.net.

References:

Venkatesh Rauo: http://enterprise2blog.com/2008/09/social-media-vs-knowledge-management-a-generational-war/
Ray Sims survey on KM definitions: http://blog.simslearningconnections.com/?p=279
Bounds analysis: http://wiki.guruj.net/Holistic!KM+Definition+Evaluation
Benedikt Koehler definitions of KM: http://blog.metaroll.com/2008/11/14/what-is-social-media-a-not-so-critical-review-of-concepts-and-definitions/