The Great Folksonomy Hijack
Oracle has produced a 30 page white paper on Folksonomy, Keywords and Tags in Enterprise Content Management. It’s fifteen pages too long, largely due to a big helping of Philosophy 201 (ontologies, teleologies, denotation and connotation liberally sloshed together) and the flip writing style of someone who doesn’t care too much about their audience – or disdains them – exemplified by this little gem among others:
“A dash of consideration of the risks and problems with Folksonomies is warranted lest the utopian proclivities of the more excitable new technology advocates take over.”
The sense of superiority continues with a patronising nod to the value of tagging and folksonomies which are unfortunately incomplete without – yes, a “best-of-breed” solution, and Oh my goodness, it’s Oracle ECM!
“What is required is a solution that is a discipline which incorporates best-of-breed enterprise content management technology with enabling democratic, social and legacy approaches to provide the right users with the right content at the right time. ”
I think we saw this before somewhere… oh yes, in the Great Knowledge Management Hijack in 1999-2001. Oh, and by the way, in case you’re wondering, Oracle has the solution to all your problems. Because they understand smart philosophical language. Oh, and because their product is called “Universal Content Management” – universes are bigger (and better?) than enterprises.
This whole paper is almost as annoying as the Autonomy presentation at KM Australia recently where we were told that we didn’t need to worry our little heads about metadata and taxonomies any more, because Autonomy “understands everything its reads”. I kid you not, you can see their video case studies to check this out (you have to wait until about half way through until they sting you with this little dart, just as we do with the Oracle white paper). If these systems are so smart, perhaps we should just let them write our documents as well, and we can all stay home and relax.
It doesn’t look like the major technology vendors will land on this planet any time soon. Thanks for the heads up Miguel.
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