In a recent post, I described Social
Networking Enablement as the natural evolution of Knowledge Management:
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Knowledge Management
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Social Network Enablement
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Knowledge Creation Strategy
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Submit what you know
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Publish your filing cabinet
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Knowledge Use Strategy
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Re-use: Find & tailor appropriate
knowledge from central repositories
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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
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Where Knowledge Resides
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Large, centralized repositories
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Decentralized, personal weblogs
(mostly)
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Key Knowledge Tools
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Search engines, Community of Practice
and collaboration tools
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Expertise finder, Weblog auto-publishing
tool, Social software (described below)
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Critical Connection
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People-to-knowledge
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People-to-people
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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.
Social Software Tool #1: Expertise
Finder
- 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.
Social Software Tool #2: Research Bibliography
& Canvassing Tool
- 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.
Social Software Tool #3: Knowledge
Creation Assessment & Biography Tool
- 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.
Social Software Tool #4: Knowledge
Traffic Management Tool
- 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.
Social Software Tool #5: Debrief Tool
- 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.
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MADE IN CANADA
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