There is much research pointing to the fact that knowledge management and collaboration in an enterprise can lead to greater innovation, and enhanced creativity. Knowledge management tools have been around for a long time now. They allow an organization to create a central knowledge store with the goal of encouraging knowledge reuse and collaboration. Within an enterprise, various types of project and corporate documents are the most common content of a knowledge management system. A problem with traditional knowledge management in enterprises is that it's primarily been fed top-down. The content is managed by a select few. It is a great challenge to maintain up-to-date content with these types of knowledge management systems. Traditional knowledge management tools create a view of knowledge as a separate entity outside of the normal working process.
Is there a better solution for knowledge sharing and collaboration in the enterprise? I say, it is time for the enterprise to look towards the growing phenomenon of social software. Social software is all about connecting individuals and sharing information. Here, individuals are in control of what gets pushed into the knowledge sphere. Each individual is able to maintain their own space for which they have complete control over the information they choose to share. This creates a bottom-up style of information sharing and collaboration, rather than a corporate imposed top-down strategy. Components of social software may include web logs (blogs), wikis, feed aggregators, along with some of the more traditional collaboration tools, chat, forums, instant messaging. Social software transforms knowledge management into a social process, in which the knowledge is a social construct.
Traditional knowledge management tools treat knowledge simply as content to be managed. Treating the knowledge as a social construct will create more relevant knowledge that can be applied in daily work.
Employees are free to share what they want and how they want. They are not forced into a rigid knowledge management process or hierarchy.
Social software integrates knowledge more closely into the social fabric of the enterprise. The sharing of knowledge is not a separate task and system to be supported but instead becomes integrated into the normal communication channels for finding and collaborating with other employees. The sense of community within the enterprise can be greatly enhanced through social software.
Social software keeps the knowledge more current and useful by distributing the responsibility and ownership of the content across the entire enterprise.
The employees know best what is useful knowledge to share with others.
Thus, it makes sense to put them in control of their share space.
With traditional knowledge management tools, the content is managed by project, division, or similar group structures, and thus aggregrated at that level. With social software, aggregated data is achieved through feed management using technologies such as RSS. Everything is a feed.
All the blogs and wikis can be aggregated and searched through feed management. You can have a feed of all project related blogs and wikis, a corporate feed, an HR feed, etc.
Social software encourages not only the sharing of knowledge, but also the connection of individuals.
Social software allows users to find those with similar or required skill sets, interests, and expertise levels. Social software can expose the abilities of the organization.
If anyone has any stories to share about the use of social software tools within an enterprise, I'd love to hear them.
Until next time,
Timothy
