I have read about the debate between Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee with interest but resisted getting involved until now. The debate was recently posted on again in a useful way on this blog by Tom Mandel, Transforming enterprise work — can it transform the enterprise itself? I have great respect for Tom Davenport who is a former colleague and, I think, one of the most reasoned thinkers in knowledge management, as well as other fields. I also have great admiration for what Andrew McAfee is doing and look forward to meeting him at the Enterprise 2.0 RAVE in a few weeks. .

There are many technologies that have transformed the enterprise and there are many more that have failed to live up to their hype. Usually those that did the transforming came along as social and cultural changes set the stage for this transformation. We can argue the relative contributions of the technology and the social context. The respective roles of each seem to be part of this debate and they should not be confused.

I look at what Tom actually wrote and I think he nicely captures some of the organizational obstacles that will have to be overcome for organizations to effectively use enterprise 2.0 tools. Many of us have already mentioned some of these same obstacles. He also closes his piece with another thought that is consistent with a number of posts on this blog, including mine. In Toms’ words

“I freely admit, however, to one key uncertainty. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens when the young bucks and buckettes of today’s wired world hit the adult work force. Will they freely submit to such structured information environments as those provided by SAP and Oracle, content and knowledge management systems, and communication by email? Or will they overthrow the computational and communicational status quo with MySpace, MyBlog, and MyWiki?”

This seems to me to be an openness to the possibilities of change here. In the early days of blogs, Tom was skeptical of their role for knowledge workers. We were in a session together and I had to follow his concerns with a session on what blogs bring to business. It was a hard act to follow and his concerns certainly gave me a humorous and humble intro. Tom was writing Thinking for a Living at the time. I think this book is one of the best treatments of how to empower knowledge workers and it covers what knowledge management should be. He expressed some of his same concerns about blogs in the book (p.108) but also added a possible positive role:

“…argues that his own blog – and those of some others – is really a vehicle for managing his own personal knowledge. If this particular use of blogs caught on broadly, it could represent a new approach to organizational knowledge management.”

More openness to change here. It is the younger generation that Tom mentions as possible change agents who use web 2.0 tools like blogs to manage their personal knowledge so it will be an easier step for them to manage their personal business knowledge in a similar way. This seems consistent with his close quoted above.