Unleashing Social Knowledge
Valuable business knowledge outside of documents is increasing. Twitter users generate 90 million tweets per day1. An estimated 210 billion email messages are being sent every day2. Information is changing from big, formal, thick documents to small, informal and voluminous communications (emails, IMs, tweets, comments). Instead of feeding information updates to a master document author for future revisions, valuable decisions, conclusions, opinions and lessons are stored exclusively in communications threads.
The snowballing demands for business agility from growing global competition, costs, regulations and growth expectations have shifted work from structured teams and processes to virtual teams and unstructured collaborations. The applications, content and records management systems we traditionally rely upon for knowledge management do not capture this growing knowledge source.
New School
Solutions like Lotus Notes or SharePoint have offered for decades the ability to centralize some portion of collaborative content from email silos. However, these "old school" platforms are complex and provide little functionality without customization by IT or expensive consultants. This is too slow for today's agile business needs and too expensive given common budget constraints.
Business social collaboration tools similar to Facebook, Twitter, blogs and wikis offer an easier alternative that is familiar to employees (nine out of 10 Internet users visited a social networking site each month in 20103). This is critically important for rapid adoption by employees, but social collaboration offers a key benefit to the organization, too. Users are reducing Web email4 in favor of embedded social messages5. This brings these conversations into a central repository where this critical collective knowledge can be captured, analyzed, discovered and securely shared.
Knowledge Gets Social
Social collaboration includes a bundle of key advantages for knowledge management. Following are some examples:
- Personal information cloud: Social, for the first time, is helping to move information from personal silos like email inboxes into a centralized cloud where it can be captured, analyzed and discovered by others;
- Social bookmarking: As the amount of content on the Web explodes, sites like delicious.com, stumbleupon.com and digg.com have demonstrated the value of democratized content recommendations;
- Media abundance: The eruption of mobile devices has flooded us with multimedia, including photos, audio and video. Social collaboration leverages familiar interfaces (from sites like facebook.com, flickr.com) for submitting and organizing media on varied devices;
- Crowdsourcing: By breaking problem discussions out of email into a controlled, more transparent forum with self-subscription capabilities, larger, more diverse groups can be leveraged for faster and better problem solving;
- Consumer-driven: Portals and internal solutions are only useful if they deliver what users want and expect-currency, relevance, interaction;
- Engagement: Social engages users. One out of every eight minutes online is on facebook.com6; an
- Discussions: Not all important knowledge ends up in documents. In fact, the average person sends and receives about 200 emails per day7. Email is (currently) where knowledge goes to die8. Instead, social collaboration captures this knowledge for easy future recall and discovery.
Social Contextual Collaboration
Information workers need fewer, not more, collaboration destinations. The productivity losses of email interruptions alone are 30% 9. The context switching that users experience when, for example, attempting to resolve an exception in an order-entry system, creates friction in the business process. This friction can result in process delays and other inefficiencies. The answer is to build the collaboration service directly into the business process. Linking the collaboration content to the associated business objects then enables contextual recall, improving overall knowledge management10.
Social applications like Facebook, while social in purpose, also include social collaboration tools that can be utilized inside of business organizations for knowledge management and productivity gains. To maximize these benefits, consistent social collaboration tools should be integrated across the business applications used every day.
Qontext is an enterprise social collaboration platform for facilitating content sharing and contextual conversations across business applications, which can be effortlessly recalled contextually. Qontext unlocks work-related conversations and spurs active collaboration inside organizations.
Qontext is a ready-to-use hosted service (SaaS) with secure scalability, predictable and optimized IT costs, a dependable global SLA, and monthly user subscription fee that is as low as the price of a cup of coffee!
1 RJMetrics, Jan 2010
2 drthomasjackson.com
3 Comscore, Feb 2011
4 Comscore, Dec 2010
5 http://www.facebook.com/about/messages
6 Comscore, Feb 2011
7 http://michaeli.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/01/the-plague-of-e.html
8 http://bfrench.info/public/item/5994
9 Case Study: Evaluating the Effect of Email Interruptions within the Workplace, Jackson, Dawson, Wilson, 2002
10 Matthew W. Cain, Gartner, 2011?