For years organisation’s have struggled to realise the potential of their collective knowledge because they have no way of collecting or sharing it. Many have tried, some more successfully than others, to install IT systems that will provide the tools to do it; search, document storage, online staff profiles and CVs. Few (if any) have really managed to nail the problem.
The issue is that more often than not the tools are misused, abused, or simply don’t work. Search systems don’t return the results people need, and they give up using them. People publish documents because they are told to, what they publish is not always great as a result. Profiles and CVs are useful to new staff, but offer little value to individuals with established networks who will use those to find someone with the skill or interest they are looking for.
What is needed is a system that allows people to share their interests, to create groups around specific areas of research or development, to share their ideas and thoughts with other like minded people and connect with them. The system has to put individuals (and specifically not management) in control of these functions. It has to let them create, join or leave these groups. Let them invite others to connect to them and their ideas. It has to give anyone and everyone an equal voice, focusing on people and their interests, not interests and the people who have them. It has to be like a social networking application?
Social Networking sites, like Facebook, offer these tools;
- they empower individuals to create groups and communities who share an interest
- they provide a simple, easy to use contact point for sharing applications, documents, images, videos etc
- they provide a gateway for people to discover, and connect to, others who share their enthusiasm for specific topics.
As well as providing the right type of functionality to support Knowledge Management, social networking style applications would also be familiar to people, reducing the need for training, and (hopefully) also reducing any resistance to using them.
Update - 22 Aug 2007 - MySpace for spies
The US are launching a MySpace / Facebook style application for their intelligence analysts. This is a perfect example of what I had in mind; cross country, Worldwide, (in this case) cross agency collaboration and information exchange, using the social networking concepts and ideas to benefit an organisation’s “business”. (Found via TechCrunch)
This article was published within the following categories: Business, Productivity
Comments (2)
Hi Jim,
Good to see you up and running with a more business focused blog.
Can you give any concrete examples of where you think a social networking approach is going to help with Knowledge Management? I’m struggling to think of something real and tangible.
Hi Smiler,
One possible area that could benefit from a social network approach could be “innovation” in big multinational organisations.
Before leaving PA I worked on an idea for a multi national pharmaceutical company that wanted to promote innovation across their entire organisation, Worldwide.
One of the problems they faced was connecting the right people with the right skill sets with one another to help generate and develop ideas. These people needed a simple, self organised way of publishing ideas, videos of prototypes, documentation of designs, etc and then sharing those with each other and discussing them. The organisation in question was also keen to add some sort of formal process around the development of new ideas so that they could concentrate resources on areas with the most potential.
I could see a facebook like application working well here, as it would allow for cross time zone communication between people who are interested in the same ideas. It would also allow people to discover others with the right interests and skill sets to help them with their projects and allow them to share their documents etc in the same way facebook does with photos.
Some sort of voting functionality could allow the great ideas to float to the top of the pile, exposing the best and most popular ones to management for further investigation.
Unfortunately I didn’t get to develop the idea any further as I moved over to ProcServe before the Innovation project kicked off properly but it would have been a great project to work on.
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