Social tools take KM to a new level

The US Army is one of a growing number of major organisations that are using social media tools to share knowledge

Let's get one thing straight up front: knowledge in its pure sense cannot be managed. However, it can still be nurtured and exploited. And the resulting discoveries can be documented if thought to hold potential value for others.

Knowledge can’t be managed explicitly because it exists only between our ears. It comprises our personal insights and experiences. Much of it is highly contextual and may or may not be of use to someone else. This is why the very early knowledge management initiatives came unstuck. Someone had the bright idea of “harvesting” peoples’ knowledge and sticking it in a retrieval system before they left the firm or moved on. This approach would only ever be effective when the knowledge lay in a narrow and slowly changing domain, if the possessor were able to articulate it and willing to give it up. Modern organisations face new challenges daily and require a more dynamic form of knowledge management (KM).

Most KM systems to date have extended their brief into the content world where knowledge has been encapsulated in some way – a recording, some training material, a document and so on – and stuck into a knowledgebase. This essentially ossified content then joins all the other sources of information in a business such as business intelligence, accounting records, market intelligence and so on.

When studied, the information may change the reader’s understanding and lead to new insights, or new knowledge that may or may not find its way back into the outside world. Data, by the way, is essentially raw material that may be transformed, usually by an IT system, into useful information. From a strict knowledge management perspective, we can ignore data.

While information is potentially easy to manage using IT systems, knowledge is a different matter altogether. It has far more to do with people and behaviour than it does with IT. However, for the exploitation of knowledge to be effective, IT will usually be called on to provide some supporting tools. These have evolved over time and recent developments in social or collaborative software have introduced the human factor, which, arguably, should have been there all along.

Organisations benefit when knowledge is shared in context and according to need. They do not benefit anywhere near as much from the “let it all hang out” tendencies of Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Taken as a whole, the noise in these public sites tends to overwhelm the signal, although many users are able to filter reasonably effectively through RSS feeds and being careful about what they write and who they follow. The danger remains that business professionals are so busy sneering at the public manifestation that they fail to see that the same mechanisms, deployed behind the firewall, can be of immense value to the organisation and, possibly, to its partners and stakeholders. Social networking brings the promise of knowledge sharing and creation of new knowledge through dialogue between people with common interests.

With commitment from the top, ground rules agreed and “champions” in place, the mandated addition of social networking to the knowledge management repertoire is likely to achieve a number of useful and complementary outcomes.

A poll of IT professionals by Freeform Dynamics last year found that the top three expected benefits from collaboration were operational efficiency, knowledge retention, innovation and creativity, in that order. In fact, the first two scored 70 and 60 per cent respectively. If you add in the “secondary consideration” scores, the figures shoot up to 96 and 94 per cent. As with all online polls, the respondents were self-selecting according to their interest (pro- or anti-) in the subject. Having said that, the skew is very clearly in favour of social networking.

Many major organisations have successfully introduced business social networking. GE, IBM, Cisco, MindTree, BP and the US Army are just a few examples of organisations that have successfully blended social networking with their knowledge management systems. It is likely that none of them started off by looking at the tools available. They will have considered the business issues associated with having valuable knowledge locked in people’s heads instead of being shared and put to good use. They will have realised that engagement with others is one of the best ways to liberate the knowledge.

Raj Datta, vice president and chief knowledge officer at MindTree, said, “Knowledge Communities in MindTree have allowed people to engage with each other and build a sense of belonging to MindTree. This results in people building their support network and increases satisfaction. This has shown up year after year in our company-wide surveys.

“Several Knowledge Communities in MindTree have gone beyond knowledge sharing and helped the company to build capability in a self-organised manner. For example, communities have come up with methodologies, tools, reusable software, and even strategic direction that the company has harnessed to build its capability.”

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Another way is to publish something, in a wiki perhaps, and to invite corrections and amplifications. Words such as “trust” and “transparency” start to enter the conversation and not everyone or every organisation is comfortable with this.

“Wiki has been very effective in allowing us to build a rich knowledge base of project learnings, one line at a time. You don’t need to think like a professional writer to do this, and hence everyone can contribute in building both depth and breadth into the knowledge base,” says Datta.

People need to learn, quickly, that sharing knowledge with others will actually increase their power rather than decrease it. Those who are unwilling to participate will become invisible and run the risk of being sidelined.

Relevant people and information need to be found quickly, regardless of place in the hierarchy or geographical location, to help the seekers to do their work more effectively. An easily searchable directory of personal profiles that allows users to add their own work-related details and contact points (email, IM and so on) will enable others to find them, learn all about them, find their presentations or publications and follow their recommendations (information, people and groups).

Even better would be if they and visitors could add what they see as relevant tags. The seeker of information may well find what they’re looking for without actually approaching the individual concerned. If not, a clearly articulated plea to a carefully chosen individual will generally evoke a positive and sympathetic response. Simply by committing their details to the profile page, they have made clear the degree to which they are willing to play the social networking game. The aim, as with all knowledge management, is to accelerate understanding and decision-making, leading to the right actions.

Traditional knowledge management systems are focused on content while social networking is focused on people. Content comes from people and from the dialogues that hang between them. Not everything needs to find its way into a knowledgebase information object. How many times have you kicked around an idea with others only to find that, using your collective knowledge, you’ve all arrived at a better place than any of you could acting alone? Computer-supported social networking holds out the promise of capturing these discussions from which, if determined to be of wider value, it is possible to document the outcomes and provide links to the participants.

No one likes revolution. Gentle but firm introduction of social networking procedures, rules and tools will ensure that the organisation evolves to a richer form of knowledge management than existed previously. Don’t try to go high, wide and handsome – pilots are essential for your own learning and proofs of concept will show others the potential.

Expect the culture in those parts of the organisation touched by social networking to change. In essence, individuals will start to give up their personal knowledge for the collective benefit. You’ll know the culture is shifting when people start talking about “we” more than “I”.

The important things to remember are that knowledge management is as much about people and processes as it is about tools and that the system you end up with will be a blend of formal and informal, dialogue and content.

Read how to keep your KM policy within the law here