Taka has a good argument at Awasu which deserves an answer. Mostly because he disagrees about information as scaffold.
I think the problem may be that we use different terms in different ways. To me a scaffold is something that is designed to be taken down after the structure, whatever it is, has been built, once it can stand alone, it doesn't needed the scaffolding so it can go. If we left it there it wouldn't hurt, apart from the aesthetics, but it is now superfluous. The network is not disposable in the sense that we must always have access to it.
I see information like that, it is largely irrelevant to the maintenance and development of relationships. When I get off the plane in London and see my old mate Kevin, whom i have known since I was 13, it doesn't matter what we talk about, we pick up any old thing, from the quality of the flight to something on the radio to dinner.
And every conversation about every topic helps us to maintain the relationship and to suss out how each is really feelig about life - what we choose to talk about is metadata, what we disagree on is more metadata, how comfortable we feel just sitting in silence tells us stuff about the relationship.
But I think Taka hits the nail absolutely on the head with this passage.
This is what I call the McDonalds question: how do you get low-skilled, inexperienced trainees to consistently produce hamburgers and fries to an acceptable level of quality? Process. And it’s the same thing in a corporate environment: how do you get people, who generally don’t really give a toss about what they’re doing, to write proposals and reports and all the other guff to an acceptable level? Document templates and guidelines.
Corporate KM and other such initiatives are our typically short-sighted attempt to find technical solutions to what is actually a people problem. There are plenty of people selling solutions and processes and methodologies to “fix” the information management issues that exist within companies because it’s an easier problem to tackle than the real underlying issue: how do you get people to actually give a damn about what they’re doing?
Underlying what I was talking about in the other post is to make explicit that very fact; organisations that think of their people as fungible will be lead inexorably down the path of document management and "knowledge capture" solutions that will not help them survive, and they don't deserve to.
The kicker for all this came from Euan Semple the other night who told me about a company rep who asked him, "how do you stop corporate knowledge leaving with the person?"
So, to reiterate a point that might have been a bit buried in the verbiage, organisations with a future do not need KM systems because they have active, engaged people who know what the hell they are doing.
The corollary is, if you think you can't survive without a KM system, you probably can't survive anyway.
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