Confessions of a technophile

I've just finished some really fruitful enterprise IT related classes -- Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Knowledge Management -- over the last two weekends, perhaps more so than most of the library courses I've taken so far. There is a lot to learn from these two areas as far as libraries are concerned. SOA will change the way we look at our library infrastructure, including digital libraries, through the use of loosely coupled services that encapsulate various functionality (think collection, metadata, discovery, delivery and user services) that can be reused across the (library) enterprise. No longer should we tolerate silos comprising a plethora of legacy systems that replicate common functionality. Read the National Library of Australia's IT Architecture Report to find out what they're doing with SOA.

Of course, it's easier said that done. Typically, IT systems are relics that reflect the organizational behavior of an enterprise. People don't talk to each other, and different project teams think they have unique needs, and therefore deserve the right to develop their own systems regardless of the presence of similar functionality that might have already been developed in another project. SOA nirvana can only be achieved with enforced governance policies that foster behavioral norms and other activities surrounding the services lifecycle.

As for Knowledge Management (KM), libraries should be glad that they are already dealing with this for the longest time ever. In fact, the development of KM has thrown the work that librarians do into the limelight since it largely involves concepts like classification and taxonomies, and information organization and access.

KM as a discipline however, remains suspect. Some people see it as just a way for HR to talk to IT, while others see it as a management fad that has been rejuvenated recently with the rise of Web 2.0 technologies. The only contribution I see from the KM discipline is in the area of tacit knowledge, where people learn from each other through socialization in Nonaka's SECI model. Since knowledge can only exist in the minds of people, it cannot be stored and managed. Most KM literature, however, are really only talking about managing information and not knowledge.