Five Reasons to Socialize Your Knowledgebase Inside the Firewall

We all know technology and information managers are under increasing pressure to justify expenditures. In today’s economic climate, projects under consideration are those that directly increase revenue, reduce costs through improved organizational efficiencies, or spawn innovation and improve competiveness.

At the same time, organizations are wrestling with how best to utilize new social media technologies and benefit from the promise of greater collaboration and organizational effectiveness. New social technologies are transforming the way people share information and network. The skyrocketing popularity of social networking sites like MySpace and LinkedIn is challenging corporate managers to look at how social media technologies can produce real business benefits inside the firewall.

These forces might seem to be at odds. How can managers make room in an already tight budget for new, untested, or unproven social technologies? The fact is, not all social technologies are appropriate for the enterprise. But for some applications — for instance, knowledge management — there’s a strong case for social technology.

Becoming "social" doesn’t equate to setting up a Facebook page and tweeting corporate data on Twitter. But it does mean moving to a new two-way (Web 2.0) paradigm regarding enterprise knowledge management, where information can be strengthened and acted upon by the organization. This is in contrast to traditional content management systems, which rely on business process re-engineering in order to gather information and input from the workforce.

Empowering the broader organization to contribute to its knowledgebase, and putting tools in place to ensure knowledge is properly vetted and managed, are the keys to creating a true Social Knowledge Network (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. SKNs provide a way to unleash this wisdom so employees can share knowledge and update and enrich core content. This creates a dynamic, living knowledgebase, where employees can gain access to reliable information and enhance the value of the knowledgebase.

Perhaps the best part is, compared to traditional knowledge management systems, an SKN avoids the need for business process re-engineering because it utilizes Web 2.0 concepts to gather and capture knowledge. In addition, an SKN starts with a high-quality repository which, unfortunately, most social media products do not provide, or worse, do not believe is needed. An SKN avoids the chaos of social media by providing a layer of "social security" that enables control over what, when, and how contributions are made. Because of this social security layer, an SKN avoids the information veracity problems that are typical in traditional social media.

Benefits of Socializing Your Knowledgebase

SKNs provide a low-cost method of capturing and sharing information. This allows for rapid discovery of high-quality, relevant information, which improves organizational effectiveness. It also creates a single repository for end users to access vetted and tacit information assets. This consolidates information silos, which in turn increases productivity and reduces IT footprints and associated costs. Here’s how.

Faster access to rich, relevant information: Consider a scientist in a pharmaceutical company conducting later stage clinical trial testing. She can use the SKN to quickly access a report completed by a fellow scientist that describes the side effects of the drug in a section of the population that’s prone to a certain interaction or side effect. Not only does her research benefit from having all relevant information accessible in a single repository, but user ratings, comments and social tags from her colleagues further inform her insight and understanding of the information.

Consolidated information silos: Most companies have many information silos scattered across departments within their organization. Content is contained in multiple systems, storage folders and drives, and it might be disorganized, poorly named and unmanaged. This can make it very difficult and time-consuming for employees to find what they’re looking for. SKNs, however, consolidate data from existing content, project, document and digital asset management systems into one, organized knowledgebase. This provides employees one place to find information, speeding and easing information discovery.

Increased productivity: A Workplace Productivity Study by LexisNexis found 62 percent of knowledge workers spend a “lot of time” sifting through irrelevant information to find what they need. Eighty-five percent of white collar workers also reported that not being able to access the right information at the right time is a “huge time waster.” By providing immediate access to the right information at the right time, SKNs help increase productivity and efficiency. Employees can focus their time on their own core competencies and the business objective at hand, rather than wasting time searching for and validating information. In fact, social comments and tags increase findability and further improve efficiencies.

Reduced IT footprint and costs: SKNs help reduce IT footprints because an organization’s content silos and their associated costs are eliminated. Some SKNs also integrate with enterprise platforms, including Microsoft SharePoint. They provide sophisticated social, search, security and library workflow capabilities not found in SharePoint. For the hundreds of thousands of companies using SharePoint, this integration is a way to extract more value from their IT investment.

Improved organizational effectiveness and ROI: SKNs by their very nature are more strategic. By creating a centralized knowledgebase where vetted and tacit knowledge is combined, organizations can better derive value from their most strategic assets — people and information. Successful SKNs produce measurable productivity benefits and create environments that not only manage and retain crucial knowledge capital, but also spawn collaboration and innovation necessary for success.

From the boardroom to the desktop of knowledge workers, everyone in an organization is impacted by the current economic climate. Specifically, information and technology managers must make hard decisions about spending priorities.

Organizations that are poised to succeed and thrive in this new economy will focus on leveraging core information and human assets as they rethink their approaches to knowledge management. SKNs are uniquely positioned to address these needs by providing a cost-effective system for capturing, sharing and socializing information.