Muddy Waters

As an exception, I'll comment in some detail on Andy's The Grass is always simpler post:

Anjo illustrates this to me again in his musing as to the complex nature of KM where nobody agrees on anything to the somewhat more elegant clustering of extrusion terms. Now if your an expert in extrusion the opposite is true, what is knowledge seems a trivial question compared to how to set up and run a certain part of an extruder. Yes they seem to have nicely classified terms, but that's the high level jargon, underneath that are a myriad of views opinions and divergence.

In my original post the main complaint was that in KM, it appears that, different people use the same/similar terms to mean something completely different. And, more or less by force, I reached the conclusion that KM'ers do not use terms to share a common understanding, but they use terms to create a new (and personal) reality. See also Martin Roell's comments.

Andy's reference to experts is a bit curious. Experts, by definition, know a lot about a very specific subject. Put two experts on a subject together in a room, and they will vehemently disagree on just about anything specific to their expertise. Put two experts and an observer in a room, and the experts will agree on just about anything being discussed. Generally, both experts will solve any specific problem. As far as knowledge management goes, the shared understanding is more important than the differences of opinion between the experts. Their mental models will be different, but they'll arrive at a solution. For a knowledge manager, not being an expert herself, the problem is finding ways of communicating with the experts and optimizing the overall objectives of an organisation. In general, I think this can work if the knowledge manager knows enough of the expert's vocabulary to communicate.

This observation is biased by "technical (engineering) domains". Applied to KM itself, and several related areas, it certainly does not seem to work at all. These are muddy waters.