David Weinberger's Intranet Buzz:
Post-Modern Knowledge Management: A One-Question Interview(TM)

Kevin Werbach, the editor of Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 (http://release1.edventure.com/), wrote an excellent issue on Knowledge Management that's much in accord with what we've been blathering on about. Further, he says he's writing about "Post Modern KM" and we here at JOHO are such suckers for anything POMO that we once paid a guy at eBay an extra $25 because he offered to say the uninterruptible power supply we'd bought was in fact post-modern. So, we put the question to Kevin:

  Q: What is postmodern knowledge management?

  A: Knowledge management has traditionally suffered
  from the hubris of modernism: the belief that we
  can discover ultimate truths and organize the
  world according to rational principles using
  clever code. The idea was that we should capture
  and organize bits of "knowledge" in central
  databases. The people involved were relevant only
  as donors to the common ontology or as empty
  vessels into which knowledge could be poured.

  Life -- and business -- doesn't work that way.
  It's messy, complex and subjective. Real workers
  have the disturbing habit of being human, so they
  refuse to change their behavior or to contribute
  metadata into a shared pool. And universal
  taxonomies are worthless if divorced from the
  subjective experience of those who use or generate
  that information.

  Enter postmodern knowledge management.
  Postmodernism holds that our concept of reality is
  always warped by the lenses of individual
  subjectivity and group power dynamics. Therefore,
  postmodern KM can't be about management at all,
  because management implies external control of
  some definable resource. Its goal is simpler yet
  deeper: leveraging people. Postmodern KM operates
  within and on the basis of existing behavior
  patterns, mining conversation streams and
  relationships automatically to incorporate
  structure and context into the information human
  users already manipulate. It fosters human
  intelligence and interaction rather than trying to
  replace them.

  Concretely, that means things like automatically
  parsing email messages and other internal content
  to draw out useful context and associations (an
  approach being pursued by Lotus and a bevy of
  startups including Tacit Knowledge Systems,
  Abridge, EcoCap, Krypteian and Neomeo); mining
  discussion content and user feedback on intranets
  (Newknow); adding workflow directly into email
  messages (Zaplet); and building on Weblogs as a
  powerful Web- native tool for knowledge sharing
  (Onclave and Slashdot derivatives). In other
  words, tools to help knowledge manage itself.
  

Excellent thoughts. We have nothing to disagree with, damn him! So, rather than standing mute in admiration, let's get POMO on Kevin's ass. And the first rule of POMO analysis is to ignore the content. Content is so Enlightenment, dude! Then you pick on a trivial word that shows through a series of puns (excuse, me semantic archaeology) that the writer has been blinded by his own language, reinforcing whatever patriarchal, sexual oppression you choose to attribute to him. For example, Werbach's use of "mining" betrays that he is "mine- ing" (possessing, capitalism) the underground explosives (mining) that are hidden by their own hiddenness until they rapidly deconstruct whatever has the misfortune of tripping (a rapid exposure of the nihil (pluribus) of the unum and an hallucinogenic delusion, de-lude, de- play) them. Werbach is clearly "mining" his own business (private self self-referentially or self- reverentially defining itself by its own otherness) when he "minds" (mines) what is known (no one) to no one (known) and what no one (gnome, Gnostic) knows (no's, negates, B. Gates, billingsgate, nonsense, non-scents, bodily excrescence known gnomically only through the non-sense of knowing garden gnome). In short, Werbach's own sexual knowing is mined (mind, mynah) and, therefore, we are led ineluctably (luce, light, lux, deluxe, bourgeois) to the conclusion (conk loose shun, words of release and bondage) that Werbach is an acid-head pomosexual who wants to have sex with mynahs and -- the real point of POMO criticism -- I am smarter than he. QED.

[Note: I've collected my writings on KM at:
http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/hyperkm.html]

The Author

David Weinberger writes JOHO and is one of the Ringleaders of cluetrain.com, a manifesto of web ethics. He also provides strategic marketing consulting to high-tech companies, writes for several magazines (including Wired) and is a commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered." He was, as VP of Strategic Marketing, one of the shapers of Open Text's intranet strategy. David sits on several conference boards and is a member of AIIM's Emerging Technology Advisory Group. Reach him at self@evident.com.