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The FASTForward Blog

Social Media Versus Knowledge Management: Generational War?October 24

How do you ‘can’ a Jedi master? How do you store the collective learnings of the organization? Why did we win that sale? What have we built somewhere else before? What did that design look like? We can take a relational database, slice it, dice it, and cut it, rotate those cubes, and do data mining. But in the end, the difference is what really animates an organization is a human being.”

These are questions put forth in an interview I had several years ago with Allan Frank, chief technology officer for AnswerThink Consulting Group Atlanta and formerly national partner-in-charge of enabling technologies for KPMG Peat Marwick LLP. As Allan so aptly put it, knowledge management has always been a confounding issue for organizations seeking to better digitize, if you will, their collective knowledge. All too often, huge pieces of that collective learning have walked out the door to other organizations or to retirement.

Now, of course, we see social networking as a way to organically capture an assemble that collective knowledge, both within and outside the enterprise walls. But how is the more informal, almost free-for-all social networking approach meshing with more formal efforts to capture and leverage knowledge?

Xerox researcher Venkatesh G. Rao, said that the emerging tension between social media and knowledge management is a “generational war

A workbook on doing disruptive innovation effectivelyOctober 24

The Innovator’s Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work, Anthony, Scott D. et.al.

The Innovator’s Guide to Growth is the newest installment in a series of books articulating and explicating Prof. Clay Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. This hands on guide packages some of the insights developed as an outgrowth of the consulting work of Innosight, LLC, the consulting firm founded by Christensen to pursue the practical insights from his research at the Harvard Business School. If innovation is part of your current or prospective job description, this needs to be on your shelf (after you’ve read it, of course).

Christensen’s theories of disruptive innovation appeared first with the publication of The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997. During the worst excesses of the dotcom boom, every start up business plan including an obligatory head nod to Christensen and an assertion that their business model was truly disruptive. Who doesn’t want to be innovative; ideally disruptiv

Dueling philosophies: social media vs. knowledge managementOctober 17

Venkat Rao of Xerox recently introduced an important argument about the underlying differences between social media and knowledge management approaches inside the Enterprise. Here’s the way I described them at delicious. Both are worth a look, a read, and some thought.

Enterprise 2.0 Blog » Blog Archive » Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War - An interesting and thought provoking post on some major philosophical differences between the world of knowledge management and social media. While I think the effort to link these differences to generational differences (Boomers vs. Millenials) is a bit of a stretch, the contrasts in philosophy and approach themselves are quite telling.
Enterprise 2.0 Blog » Blog Archive » Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: The Reactions - This is a follow up to an earlier discussion of the differences between knowledge management and social media in the enterprise. It collects various responses and reactions and goes on to react to the reactions. Definitely well worth reading.

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Are Enterprise 2.0 Applications Prices Going to Fall? What About Market Size?October 14

I recently wrote on this blog on why the enterprise 2.0 market might continue to grow in a down market, see Awareness Report Shows Significant Rise in Enterprise Social Media - Will It Continue? My blog colleague Jevon MacDonald covered the concept in more depth in his post, In uncertain times, Enterprise 2.0 takes the stage. I really like the series of points Jevon made. He concludes with this statement, “In a time of uncertainty such as we have seen in the past several months, new and promising technologies may prove to be the safest harbour for those who must continue to deliver growth.”

Forrester is leader in promoting the enterprise 2.0 market. More recently, Oliver Young provided a new report with some cautions, Vendors: Prepare For Falling Prices For Enterprise Web 2.0 Collaboration And Productivity Apps. It was likely written before the recent market downturn. The summary states, “The enterprise Web 2.0 market is experiencing an explosion of activity among enterprises seeking collaboration and productivity improvements. While that explosion is placing Web 2.0 technology in the hands of millions of knowledge workers, cutthroat competition, commoditization, bu

An Early (and Smart) Step Towards “Mainstreaming” Enterpise 2.0October 11

At the end of September (seem so long ago now) Ross Mayfield’s Socialtext announced the go-to-market of SocialText 3.0 (Connected Collaboration With Context), involving the integration of Facebook and Twitter functionalities into the wiki-based Socialtext collaborative platform.

In my opinion this reinforces a major trend that I believe will redefine how knowledge work is designed (I wrote about this massive trend and its importance in the Ark Group publication "Making Knowledge Work - The Arrival of Web 2.0"). 

What I mean by trend is that over the past two years all the major workplace software vendors - Microsoft, IBM Lotus, Open Text, Google, Oracle, EMC Documentum, SAP, Adobe and so on - have all launched (or acquired companies that provide the elements of) "renovated" platforms that have collaboration and social computing at their cores.

When a critical mass of large organizations have upgraded or migrated to platforms with collaboration and social computing at their cores, I expect that the changes to the ways people work with information and each other to vreate and use pertinent knowledge will accelerate.

In the case of Socialtext 3.0, I think it’s very smart to make explicit the "transfer" of massively-adopted consumer technologies to make it easy for people to connect, collab