How Social Networks Facilitate 21st Century KM
Barely a year ago, social at work was a heated debate—could employees log into Facebook, or not? Today, enterprise social networking has become a standalone category that's exploding in the marketplace.
For early adopters, consumerization drove the business use of Facebook-like tools; now, serious players have arrived bringing real enterprise solutions to organizations large and small.
But what does private social networking mean for knowledge management? How are organizations across the globe translating this immensely popular framework into an actionable business model?
Enterprise social networks are emerging within organizations as a place where knowledge never dies, gamification drives employee engagement and your wall is transformed into a relevant stream of contextual updates from colleagues, partners or critical business applications.
Welcome to 21st Century Knowledge Management
Knowledge management of the past is about connecting people to documents. But if social media has taught us anything, it's that knowledge management, particularly the collective knowledge of your workforce, is iterative, and our number-one priority should be to create a KM framework that supports knowledge moving through systems, departments and groups of people—changeable and actionable—every step of the way.
Technology plays a role, but you need the right technology. Knowledge creation, transfer and discovery is probably not all happening in your intranet; if so, that's not the only place. Can you search a conversation in your intranet? Can you find the document you are looking for, plus get all the updates from colleagues or processes right then and there?
The best form of knowledge transfer is still through conversation. So how can you capture that and then syndicate out knowledge in context to individuals or groups based on their role, job function, projects, customers and professional development goals? Enterprise social networking creates an environment that supports the capture of every form of knowledge, preserving the context and making it extremely accessible.
The knowledge that's in your organization is evolving dail—why spend the time organizing and categorizing, when you could be analyzing? The value private social networks provide to organizations today is the ability to surface ideas and gain insights from links and patterns that are only discovered when all the people, processes and content are brought together, in one place-when knowledge management becomes connected.
Context is the New King
Not long ago, Eric Schimdt said that every two days, we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization to 2003. The result? On a given day, an average employee makes 14 phone calls, logs into nine different systems, receives hundreds of emails and shifts through thousands of files. This is not sustainable; it's only more reason we need to create contextual experiences for employees versus making sure everyone adheres to the right file structure within the intranet.
The future of knowledge management is about letting employees curate their own information consumption, empowering them to be in charge of their own learning and professional development.
Not only do conversations need to be indexed, but so do updates from processes, customer interactions and news about related projects. Also, external data needs to be brought in to enhance private, internal data. People need to be able to act in real-time—not ask five different people for a file, or call the legal department for an update on a contract, or wait until tomorrow because their manager is half-way across the world.
Information today needs to be indexed within context, it needs to be searchable and it needs to be accessible anytime, anywhere. Relevance is subjective, but 21st century knowledge management provides different experiences for everyone—this is the power private social networks can provide.
You can tag and categorize content all you want trying to make it more contextual to different groups of people, but at the end of the day, I know what I need to do my job well. With enterprise social networking, I can follow the people I need to follow, search for subject-matter experts that can help, get updates from the business applications I use and be tapped into the on-going conversations happening around me, so I can spend less time in meetings, searching for files, or waiting for the answers I need to do my job more effectively.
How Will Your Collective Knowledge Evolve?
Private social networking is the first platform for knowledge management that's multi-dimensional, imparting a spectrum of context to every piece of information your company creates and indexes. With an enterprise social network, everyone has a voice, becoming an expert is accelerated and your knowledge management goes from stale and static (20th century model) to a living and breathing stream of insights resulting in more efficient employees, greater innovation and positive business outcomes.
With enterprise social networking and the collective knowledge that can be harnessed from it, knowledge management enters the 21st century, and also the executive suite. Finally, knowledge management has transcended the limitations of an intranet—and what's coming out of it is so compelling, not even your CEO will deny the value.
With users in more than 25 countries, tibbr is the enterprise social networking platform revolutionizing the way we work, collaborate, learn and share. tibbr connects people, applications and data in context in an entirely personal way. tibbr brings together what matters-to individuals or groups-to get work done better, faster. It's an open, intensely flexible platform that can be delivered on premise or in the cloud. Learn more or try it free at www.tibbr.com.