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Followup to collaboration is anti knowledge sharing?

A few days ago I posted an article titled: collaboration tools are anti knowledge sharing? This was a deliberately provocative article, and I've now had an excellent response from Michael Sampson. To quote:

If the team has done a proper job of collecting and collating all of their discussions, all of the document editions, all of their meeting notes and so forth, that is not a collection of "knowledge" ... it's a set of data points and information items on the route to a final destination. James writes that the inability for merely anyone to understand the context of each item ("What is this file, is it a final or a draft? How does it relate to this other document? Where is the main project plan?") is a failing of the tool.

I don't buy that.

As I've commented on his post, I agree with everything that he's said. This is definitely not a technology problem, although it can be a problem caused by technology in the absence of appropriate governance.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of collaboration, and have given up on the "white elephant" KM solutions a long time ago.

What I'm concerned about is that collaboration is very much viewed as a technology issue by IT areas, leading to it spreading in an unmanaged way. This is the lesson we didn't learn from the Notes era, and are just about to be repeated in the SharePoint era if we aren't careful.

(I've got more coming on the solutions, not just the problems, so watch this space!)

PS. Michael has published some superb resources relating to collaboration, including the 7 Pillars of IT-Enabled Team Productivity. See the bottom of Michael's post for a longer list of resources.

Posted by jamesr on October 13, 2007 06:15 PM
Categories: Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0