In a recent post, I described Social Networking Enablement as the natural evolution of Knowledge Management:
| Knowledge Management |
Social Network
Enablement |
|
| Knowledge Creation Strategy |
Submit what you know |
Publish your filing cabinet |
| Knowledge Use Strategy |
Re-use: Find & tailor appropriate
knowledge from central repositories |
Qualify & Proxy: Use individuals'
knowledge to qualify them as appropriate experts to converse
with, and as a surrogate for that individual when they are not
available for conversation |
| Where Knowledge Resides |
Large, centralized repositories |
Decentralized, personal weblogs (mostly) |
| Key Knowledge Tools |
Search engines, Community of Practice and
collaboration tools |
Expertise finder, Weblog auto-publishing
tool, Social software (described below) |
| Critical Connection |
People-to-knowledge |
People-to-people |
As the table above suggests, the key technical elements of Social Networking Enablement (SNE) are business weblogs (the repositories of personal knowledge) and social software (the tools that connect people and mine their knowledge). Following is a high-level specification for commercial development of such software. In organizations with structured work processes (manufacturers, banks etc.) these elements would supplement centralized, filtered knowledge repositories of best practices, policies and methodologies etc. In organizations with primarily unstructured work processes (consultants, engineers etc.) these elements could largely supplant centralized, filtered knowledge repositories and the tools that access them.
Business Weblogs
- The process of posting to the weblog should be transparent to the user. Whenever a user saves or saves as or sends & saves a document or message, a pop-up would ask whether the document or message can be made available to other users.
- When the user answers this question 'yes', the blog software would publish the document or message in HTML, appropriately converting MS Office documents and embedded graphics to HTML without the Microsoft code bloat that their software currently produces in HTML conversion.
- The blog software would automatically abstract and categorize the document or message, using the enterprise's taxonomy, and would also allow the user to categorize (up to three levels deep) and annotate the document or message according to his/her own style and preferences.
- Users would be able to restrict access and subscription to their entire blog, categories and individual posts, though default would be unlimited access.
- The user and reader would have several options for viewing a weblog by category, by title, by subject, or by date. The view options would allow date filtering (e.g. show posts only between date x and y) and would allow more sophisticated sorting of display order (e.g. show all posts in category x, between date x and y, alphabetically by subject or title).
- A special category of posts, called Permanent Files (analogous to Userland's 'stories') including resumes, personal competency summaries and reference documents, would be established, and would appear in the blog sidebar.
- Also in the sidebar would be a table of the blog categories, a search bar, a 'change weblog view' tool, and an organized 'blogroll' of the user's links, directories and subscriptions.
- Users would therefore never have to use HTML, blog macros or other technical weblog features to manage their blog.
- This social software would identify people with expertise in a subject specified by the inquirer. The identification process would use decision rules weighing the frequency of appearance of the subject in users' weblog posts, especially in the Permanent File, category names, subject titles and abstracts.
- This software would create a map that would show all people both inside and outside the organization identified as having expertise in that subject, as well as group and enterprise-wide databases with significant content on that subject, and the links between them. The links would be identified from the Links, Directories and Subscriptions sections of users' blogs, plus other indicators of connection (frequency and mutuality of e-mails etc.)
- The expertise map would show up to three 'degrees of separation' from the inquirer to the identified experts in the subject in question. Other experts 'disconnected' from the inquirer would be shown in a table beside the map. For each expert, all contact information would be shown: phone number, e-mail and IM address, blog URL etc.
- This tool would be used to locate, extract and synthesize available knowledge on a specific subject. It would use the Expertise Finder to identify which weblogs and databases to investigate, and then create a hotlinked index of the sources and the posts on the subject, with an abstract of each post, and information on the length, currency, and original authorship of each post, and the popularity (measured by number of hits, subscriptions and blogroll frequency) of the post and/or the author's work in general.
- This tool would assess the production volume and popularity (measured by number of hits, subscriptions and blogroll frequency) of each category of each user's weblog, compared to his or her peers, for performance appraisal purposes. An expertise 'biography' for each person in the enterprise could be automatically produced from this information.
- This tool would identify areas of knowledge sharing 'congestion' (people who are receiving an unmanageable number of requests for information, or not responding to requests on a timely basis), topics that are suddenly 'hot', and the adequacy of the enterprise's knowledge about those topics, people who are excessively isolated from others (few connections or exchanges), de facto experts and thought leaders who should be recognized (or, if they are outside the enterprise, perhaps hired), etc.
- This tool would allow users to capture in a shared database intelligence, best practices, lessons learned, and stories, extracted from meetings with customers and colleagues, post-project reviews etc. In many cases this is collective knowledge that is the exception to the rule that 90% of the valuable knowledge in organizations, at least those with unstructured work processes, is personal and contextual.