Knowledge management – the generation game
Could the Web 2.0 revolution change the way your business manages information?
For years now organisations have been wrestling with effective knowledge management. With so much business information kept in people’s heads rather than in a formalised way, it’s vital that this knowledge is liberated and used to give organisations a valuable competitive edge.
While businesses have been noisily trying to solve this problem, a revolution has been quietly forming online. Millions of people regularly use the internet to create, publish, share, chat, collaborate and connect with other individuals. What the Economist termed ‘the age of participation’ is now upon us, led by the phenomenal growth in community sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Flickr, as well as collaboratively authored resources like Wikipedia.
It seems the rise and rise of these collaborative and community-based websites is unstoppable. These sites all have one thing in common: all the material submitted is user-created.
Gone are the days of passive surfing, this new movement is populated by enthusiastic users posting content in all its many forms, communicating in real time with others who share their interests, collaborating on projects and building online communities. So what can business learn from blogs, wikis, discussion forums, podcasts, instant messaging and other social networking tools?
The tail that wags the dog
By far the most important product of this revolution is the emergence of widespread consumer collaboration. Stories of brands being dismantled via online chat rooms or video content sites are becoming a common occurrence. But all too often, organisations are unaware of consumer opinion until it’s too late. If a customer has a good experience they’ll tell one person; if they have a negative experience they’ll tell five. Just imagine the exponential effect the internet has on this rule.
This instant form of collaboration is putting customers one step ahead of organisations and they’re desperately looking for ways to catch up.
If you can’t beat them
As well as using these new technologies to stay in touch with their customers many companies are now waking up to the potential value of replicating these same levels of collaboration inside the organisation. A recent study by the Economist Intelligence Unit identified the challenge of “improving the productivity of knowledge workers… as the major boardroom challenge of the next 15 years”.
Ordinarily, effective knowledge management only happens when people recognise for themselves the value in sharing their know-how and expertise with their peers. Or when they’re coaxed into doing so. Emerging channels such as blogs and podcasts give these ‘siloed specialists’ a forum to voluntarily share their knowledge with the organisation in a manner that’s fun to create and interesting to consume.
This forms an elegant solution to both the problem of knowledge experts retaining and growing experience in isolation and the problem of giving employees information in an interesting and engaging format.
What’s exciting many organisations is that the ‘holy grail’ of knowledge management – independent and unprompted volunteering of knowledge – is precisely the model that MySpace, Wikipedia and a host of similar sites operate. If businesses can find a way to leverage this shift in attitudes, they could finally develop the knowledge-sharing organisation they’ve always hankered after.
Imagine a business where discovering the depth of your colleague’s experience didn’t only happen at a company away day but was openly shared once a week via a company blog.
Or if an executive with 30 years’ experience recorded a weekly podcast commentary on the current market environment. The benefits to us as individual knowledge workers and to the organisations we work for could be enormous. People could learn faster, experience and insight could be shared more easily and problems could be solved by the entire company. Now imagine that.
