Social Media vs. Knowledge Management

Venkat’s hypothesis in Enterprise 2.0 blog is that their is  a hidden corporate war going on between KM practitioners and social media advocates rings true.  I have seen it in the way Microsoft SharePoint, with minimum Web 2.0 capabilities, is embraced by IT departments while open source web 2.0 are shunned.  He has identified 5 social dimensions of this generational war:

1. Gen X is Currently Neutral
2. KM is about ideology, SM is about the fun of building
3. The Boomers don’t really get or like engineering and organizational complexity
4. The Millenials don’t really try to understand the world
5. Boomers speak with words, X’ers with numbers, Millenials with actions

And 5 technological dimensions:

Expertise locators are not social networks

Online Communities are not USENET V3.0

RSS and Mash-ups are Gen-X ideas

SemWeb Isn’t Next-Gen, it is Last-Gen

SOA and SaaS are Gen X; Clouds are Millenial

“How the War Will End

It takes no great genius to predict how the war will end. The Boomers will retire and the Millenials will win by default, in a bloodless end with no great drama. KM will quietly die, and SM will win the soul of Enterprise 2.0, with the Gen X leadership quietly slipping the best of the KM ideas into SM as they guide the bottom-up revolution.”