The Formal vs. Informal Debate

I am struck by the differences in approach between formal and informal information systems and related technology.  While each "camp" and its zealous advocates often compete for attention within our organizations, in practice they often overlap in addressing practical business problems.  It seems to me that a mix of "best of breed" enterprise solutions can be drawn from both these "worlds."

By formal, I mean powerful, structured IT systems such as Microsoft SharePoint, or comparable COTS products from IBM, Oracle and others.  By informal, I refer to the unstructured and rapidly evolving area of open source collaboration and content management systems, as well as such proprietary products as Google Apps/Wave, LinkedIn and Facebook.

This spring an excellent  speaker (Tony Byrne) from CMS Wire addressed a D.C. Web Managers Roundtable about the continuum between more powerful, structured, and difficult to use proprietary systems and less powerful, more informal and more user-friendly social media and other apps.

A mirror to this technology debate is found in information management processes: 

• project management, in the structure of traditional project management (a la PMI's PMBOK guiding principles) vs. the fluidity of Agile Software development methods;

• or the "management" focus of KM with such tools as knowledge repositories, communities and after-action reviews vs. the more free-wheeling, conversational bent of the new, rapidly evolving social media tools such as Facebook.

My opinion is that any enterprise should be able to draw from both sides of this debate to meet practical business needs.  The challenge is where to strike the balance given pressing user demands as well as enterprise needs for standardization and efficiency.