“Two employees,
separated by thousands of miles, have each developed one half of a
business strategy that would propel your organization to the top of its
industry. A rookie engineer is about to make a decision that a seasoned
veteran in another country would recognize as the beginning of a costly
mistake. A project manager working in a remote location has no idea
that a recent advancement could increase his team’s productivity
tenfold.” – A special class of communities of practice
These are scenarios that excite interest in
knowledge management systems that can extract currently untapped
knowledge out of the workforce, and pair that knowledge with the right
people exactly at the time of their situational need.
Part of the way to manage this is by putting people in touch with each other through describing communities of practice (COP),
about which we’ve written before. Integrated software systems also are
developing that button down knowledge as it arises and disperses it
throughout the enterprise.
“While training continues to play an essential part
of organizational life, most successful organizations know that
corporate learning is no longer just about training. In today’s
hyper-intensive workplace, forward-thinking organizations are turning
to enterprise learning in their quest to be better informed, better
skilled, supported, and more competitive in their respective
marketplaces. Enterprise learning makes education part of the
organizational DNA, where data from
operations informs marketing efforts, which may, in turn, better
support sales and channel partners and make customer education easier
to manage.” – The Impact of Enterprise Learning: Extending the Impact of Enterprise Ideas and Information
How you describe a particular COP
can vary, and the associations of one worker with other workers will be
diverse, through multiple distinct affiliations. Delineating
communities of practice and linking their members in communication
resembles meta-tagging people according to their traits and
disciplines, as well as their transient missions and team memberships.
Putting
people in touch with each other because of attributes of similarity is
an invitation for synergy to develop. This search for
tacit knowledge
is also a tacit acknowledgement that only infrastructure can be imposed
from the top down: best results in knowledge development happen from
the bottom up, or perhaps it might be better said, side to side,
between de facto peers in fluid networks.
“What better validation of the power of social
networks than to indicate that they are the key primary drivers from
both KM and Innovation and how, as time goes by, they become
fundamental to businesses in order to generate more revenue.
“Well, it gets better. Because with both KM and
innovation walking hand in hand we are enabling the breaking of the
silos amongst organisations and helping knowledge workers trust each
other much more effectively and therefore allow every to share even
more. And you know what? Communities are going to play a key role in
this particular adoption of the social network within the corporate
world.” – The Role of Knowledge Management in Innovation
Information, data, is collected and
dispersed through systems already wired for source and destination.
Data travels to targets according to pre-measured requirement. But none
of this takes into account the unknown unknowns. For enterprise
learning to bloom with newly created knowledge, a certain amount of
classroom chatter has to be not only allowed but encouraged and
supported.
All the potential knowledge of a company cannot
be realized. No system or method yet exists to guarantee such a thing.
How best then, to optimize the attempt? The synergies of social
networking, in which peers determine to fine degrees their own weights
of alliance across the field, deliver demonstrated and tangible value
within the enterprise. Communities of practice can be dictated from the
top down, and they can arise from the bottom up.
It’s
possible that the optimum method of arranging the transient
combinations and recombinations of knowledge throughout any system is
through algorithms that themselves evolve in response to results,
feedback and change.
Given this, it may be most productive
to abandon all top-down micro-direction of knowledge, and at the
leadership level focus purely on protocols and principles, and rights
and permissions – and then unleash the free play of knowledge within
the company.
What are the chances of executives giving up this much control?
