Knowledge or Information?

I’m doing a fair amount of work these days on the governance arrangements which need to be in place for some of the new social media tools, such as blogs and wikis.

The wiki phenomenon in particular is an interesting one.

One of the key success factors for traditional intranets is the implementation of tools to ensure content is kept up to date, is usable, accessible for people with disabilities, and complies with the organisational policies and any regulations that affect your industry. Important so that users can have confidence that the material they are viewing is safe to use as part of their business dealings. Trusted content. This is most often achieved by having clear ownership of content. Someone you can pin responsibility to. However, in the new collaborative world of crowd-sourced content there is often no one particular owner of content, so who do you pin responsibility on?

This means we need to think differently about content governance.

But there’s another dimension. People sometimes refer to the content on these collaborative platforms as knowledge. Explicit knowledge. I don’t think there’s ever really been agreement about when explicit knowledge becomes information. There are as many views as there are practitioners. Whichever way you look at it a significant overlap will exist between knowledge management policies and information management policies. The two need to be taken together.

Then you have the issue of whether a single organisation – even some of the largest – can ever really generate effective ‘crowd-sourced’ content. Wikipedia is a good example of effective crowd-sourcing and the wisdom of crowds. It depends on a substantial volume of people having sufficient knowledge of a subject reviewing and editing content such that its accuracy and relevancy increases in, typically, small incremental steps. However, inside an organisation there are often only a handful of people who have sufficient knowledge of a subject to make a valid contribution. A handful of people does not constitute a crowd! So what happens is that the wiki platform – put in place for crowd-sourcing content – starts to be used as a (sometimes simple) content management platform, by-passing the controls and policies in place on the normal content management system. Sometimes this is done for mischievous purposes – to get people out of the rigour associated with owning important content. However, it’s more often because the wiki platform is so much easier to use than the official organisational content management system. So you can’t blame people.

You can add to that the tension between knowledge management (keep everything so we can learn from it) and information retention (get rid of everything as soon as you can).

And the fact that a wiki platform will often contain a mix of genuine crowd-sourced material and individually owned ‘published’ content.

It’s complicated.

So what’s the answer? Should we re-classify traditional content managed intranets as ‘legacy’ intranets and move to a different form of governance for the whole intranet, or should we try and force different kinds of kind onto different platforms, which will be difficult as people will naturally gravitate to the platform of least resistance?

What is clear however, that the drivers of these policies are still there, and in fact are becoming more prevalent. Growing concerns about data privacy, identity theft, stories about the potential impact of loss of data etc. mean that governance is likely to be tightened rather than relaxed. Another tension.

I’m going to have to think about this some more! Watch this space.