2010's Collaboration Imperative: Where Social Technology and Enterprise Content Collide

Many analysts are predicting 2010 to be the year of collaboration. In a recent study of IT strategists, Forrester found 70 percent of respondents believe collaboration technology will significantly cut decision making time and improve productivity this year. Couple that with Forrester’s Global Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Survey, which found 61 percent of organizations believe "content sharing" is a major ECM investment driver, and it’s clear business leaders have recognized the collaboration imperative.

Now the challenge is how best to address that imperative. Business leaders are increasingly focused on ways to enable faster, more cost-effective sharing, teaming, and learning among employees. In particular, they’re looking at social media technology as a means to this end, and determining how it can be used inside the firewall to foster collaboration and achieve business benefits.

But with more organizations putting these adoption plans and pilot projects in motion, major challenges are arising for IT. The department is tasked with finding, or in some cases, building, social collaboration applications that meet requirements for internal software, architecture, security, and governance standards. Not to mention they must often adhere to a tight budget.

For organizations interested in using social tools to cost-effectively improve collaboration, it’s crucial to connect the social technology directly to where collaboration occurs: enterprise content.

The Technology Backbone

This means using technology based on the latest advancements in enterprise knowledge management. Such technology lets organizations move to a new two-way paradigm regarding enterprise knowledge management, where information can be strengthened and acted upon by the “wisdom of the community.”

The knowledge management industry calls this technology Social Knowledge Networks (SKN). Empowering the broader organization to contribute to its knowledgebase, and putting tools in place to ensure knowledge is properly accessed, vetted, and managed, are the keys to creating an SKN.

As with traditional knowledge management systems, SKNs also collect and organize most any data — documents, presentations, photos, videos, audio recordings, etc. This information forms the basis of an organization’s core knowledgebase.

The difference is, SKNs take it one step further by adding social tools — such as blogs, wikis, online ratings, discussions, and social tags — to tap the collective wisdom of the corporate community.

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