The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration or the Twilight?
On his blog today, Nicholas Carr draws attention to an MIT Sloan Review article titled, “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” by Andrew McAfee. The post and the article explain how cheaper Web 2.0 technologies are changing the face of knowledge management.
Web 2.0 technologies like RSS, blogging, wikis and folksonomies are most certainly changing knowledge management by capturing and fueling the water cooler conversations that happen in companies. Previous knowledge management systems simply focused on capturing the structured information and could not “manage” the strategic insights and wisdom that employees had.
This is a seismic change but only when it actually happens. Few companies have any real experience with these emerging technologies. For example, there really isn’t that much blogging happening within the enterprise. We’d like to believe that every employee in every company is busy blogging and commenting away but that just isn’t true. Blogging, wikis, and folksonomies are still emerging technologies that we’re all hoping will change knowledge managemnt.
These tools haven’t changed the corporate world because they’re not that simple to use and more importantly most employees aren’t used to exposing their thinking so much. We’re just not the communicators we’d like to think we are. The cultural change will take place but its going to be slow journey. In fact, vendors like Social Text and Traction Software recommend starting blogs and wikis with small focused teams who have already burning need to collaborate and then slowly introducing the tools into the rest of the enterprise after that.
On a side note, a few years ago we launched a successful collaboration tool called Peers which was recognized by Forrester Research. I also wrote an article last fall titled, “The New Knowledge Management Imperative” (PDF) that covered how the focus of knowledge management had moved from the producer to the knowledge consumer.
Thanks to Garrick Schmitt who pointed me to the Nicholas Carr post.
