People are interested in acquiring knowledge and insight. I assert the line of ???official content??? vs. ???unofficial information??? is being erased in today’s online world where more and more relevant and high-quality information is found in little nooks and crannies both inside and outside the enterprise. If that is true, what are the ramifications for enterprise content governance?

I’m honestly torn. Certainly there is a need to organize and put forward the “official” corporate versions of content. However, we see more specialized topics (“long tail”) seeping into our everyday online activities and user expectations continue to evolve towards requiring more granularly focused content. As a result, the effort of traditional content management in the enterprise seems very rigid, slow and expensive. Further, traditional content management only covers a small percentage of knowledge available about a particular topic.

As they say, the devil is in the details. Consider all the “unofficial” but very valuable specialized information details exchanged every second through Web 2.0 and traditional communication mediums. Whether you are seeking a romantic restaurant for Valentines Day, tax planning strategies, or IBM???s latest SOA offerings, you leverage Web 2.0 to uncover specialize knowledge and insight. Blogs, wikis, email, instant messaging, forums, user ratings, mashups??? they are all adding more fuel to the fire.

Certainly social tagging has a place in addressing some of this evolution but I’m struggling with how much it addresses and whether it replaces or supplements traditional content management and governance. This leads to questions about where to spend resources with respect to traditional content management, effective marketing strategies for surfacing “official” content, user navigation, proactively providing tools for sellers to gain knowledge/insight, etc.

Alas, I have more questions than answers.