Within many professional services firms and some general enterprise environments, there is often a legal or policy requirement for highly structured, closely managed knowledge repositories and information systems. Yet, often there is a recognition that these systems are not particularly effective, as Joy London points out in a recent post about KM in the legal sector.
As Martin Duggage reminds us, part of the problem is the fact that most KM and collaboration systems start from the enterprise perspective rather than that of the individual knowledge worker. As Martin says, Designing good enterprise collaboration tools is impossible.
Increasingly, those tasked with sharing knowledge and learning within firms are coming to see enterprise KM and information systems as an enabling layer for more lightweight, personal services rather than the locus for all knowledge sharing and collaboration activities in themselves. The future is about networks, not systems, and networks flourish when the intelligence is at the edges rather than the centre. Interestingly, those professions that depend most heavily upon social networking often have the most centralised and least network-centric KM systems, but this is perhaps a reflection of the fact that they were early adopters during the first (system-centric) wave of KM IT during the 1990′s. Rather than abandon this investment, or let their systems wither on the vine, perhaps the new wave of social network thinking can be applied to get the most out of these systems and make them easier for users to engage with.
Denham Grey recently asked what are the top five key concepts in KM, and seeded the discussion with his own candidates:
Each of these clearly has a strong social networking component, most obviously PKM and tacit knowledge. On the face of it, corporate memory might be regarded as an exception that is handled only by centralised systems, but if you think about the way corporate memory actually works, the ‘wiring’ of memory depends upon your context and position, just as people remember things differently depending why they are remembering and where they are at the time. Similarly, whilst certain professions have common taxonomies and language, a useful ontology might actually be firm-, context- or even client-specific. In both cases, I believe the best approach is probably to add value to common content (documents, guides, lists of terms, etc.) by layering socially generated usage information on top of hard wired content, in the sense of user pathways, annotation, shortcuts, tags and other social affordances.
Of course, there are many other areas of interest in the ‘social’ side of KM. I am currently taking part in the virtual Online Social Networks conference, which is looking at three relevant discussion areas within organisations: Advanced Knowledge Practices In OSNs, On-Line Tools For Collaboration, Wikis and Blogs in Business. Elsewhere, the buzz is still very much about social tagging and social bookmarking, although most of these discussions relate to their use ‘in the wild’ rather than inside the firewall among people who share a common purpose. I think this is changing, as organisations start to wake up to the benefits that such techniques can provide as (cheap, simple) force multipliers for existing data sets, information stores and knowledge repositories.
Organisations might also want to consider leveraging existing investment through things like:
- Personalised RSS feeds and managed aggregation of corporate and external data feeds as a more productive alternative to email overload
- Temporary group spaces combining weblogs, wikis and other collaboration tools, which are super-easy to form and quick to dissolve when no longer required, and act as interfaces into different corporate storage systems
- Extending social tagging by allowing for personal or temporary tag sets/clouds that can act as (simple) proto-ontologies for a particular client, practice or group, providing a tailored view of existing repositories from a specific point of view to overcome the problems associated with centralised, catch-all taxonomies.
As we mentioned in our recent survey of social software, the key success factors will be at the user interface / usability level. If we can provide simple, flexible personal tools that let people get more out of existing corporate systems by taking advantage of the social affordances of a networked approach, then it has to be easy to use and easy to understand. But the point, I think, still stands: social software can provide a layer of pointers, pathways and shortcuts to help users get more out of existing corporate systems.
