How can the enterprise best
manage its proprietary knowledge, to unlock its effectiveness and
preserve its value? One concept being examined is the community of
interest. Communities gather around topics and stir the data in
discussion and collaboration. This is an important dynamic in the
clustering of knowledge into manageable units.
Dennis McDonald writes of the close relationship between innovation management and collaboration via social media.
“[...] social networking and social media tools
within an organization need to be thought of as part of the overall
communication and information management infrastructure. That is, such
tools should be universally available to all so that, when new groups
and projects form there are no artificial barriers raised to
interconnection and integration.” – Enterprise Strategies for Innovation, Content Management, and Social Media Infrastructure
Luis Suarez in his ITtoolbox blog reinforces
this theme and goes further, suggesting that every individual within
the enterprise can form a part of the innovation dynamic.
“Nowadays knowledge workers are starting to realise
how important and crucial it is to go out there and share what they
know and collaborate with others as part of a larger group (A
community) in order to keep innovating, not only because of how
exciting the whole exercise can be, but also because there is a new
generation of emerging technologies that makes all that collaboration a
lot easier to happen since you no longer focus on the fuss about
learning how to use tools, you just use social software for that and
focus on what you need to focus: innovate by collaborating with others
regardless where they may well be.
“Yes, I can certainly understand how some folks are
actually going to say that this is perhaps a bottom-up approach towards
fostering innovation within the enterprise, but I must say that you
would actually be surprised to find out how many corporations are
realising lately that innovation can take place much more efficiently
and effectively as part of a community program.” – more…
This kind of thinking presents a two-edged
word to enterprise leadership of course, at the same time both
thrilling and threatening. McDonald again, striking the balance:
“The antidote to this is that corporate management
needs to understand both how innovative practices spread throughout an
organization at the same time it plans for an enterprise content
management and communication infrastructure that provides the needed
tools to workers where and when they need them.” ibid
Knowledge management, as we’ve suggested
before, will perhaps work best in a
two-prong approach. Use library-style archival principles operating in
a harvesting fashion, and organized top-down. In combination, empower
data generation and sorting from the bottom up, within differing
degrees of organized and free-form activities across the network.
“KMWorld editors, knowledge management practitioners,
theorists, analysts and customers compiled the 2007 list to recognize
innovation and excellence in the industry. ‘If there is a single trait
shared by the “100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management,” it
is their determination to treat their entire constituency chain, from
top to bottom, with respect and without hubris,’ said Hugh McKellar,
editor-in-chief of KMWorld. ‘Clearly, attitude alone doesn’t warrant
inclusion on the list, attitude must be accompanied by elegance in the
design and implementation of their software.’” – 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management
If management finds it hard to give all the
workers data-entry passes into the collective knowledge bank, it will
find that this is nothing compared with allowing the customers in. And
yet, compelling arguments can be made for this. Watch this space.
