Social networking, Collaboration and Knowledge Management

The key themes in Enterprise 2.0 is social networking and collaboration and the technologies involved in getting this done are Wikis, Social Networking, Blogs, Search, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Social Bookmarking, Mashups, Portals, Social Voting/Ranking, Web Services, Web/Videoconferencing, Bulletin Boards/Discussion Forums, Web Content Management, Workflow/BPM, Instant Messaging, Social Network Analysis, Taxonomy and Podcasting. If you look at the list, its actually alot of stuff we are dealing with. However, most of it can be broken down to some levels of social networking and collaboration.

Many people do not think that Enterprise 2.0 is the next Knowledge Management buzzword and I am one of them. Enterprise 2.0 does much more than that. However, what enterprise 2.0 does WILL change the way people look at knowledge management in future. Let me explain why.

How Knowledge is Created?
For knowledge to be created, some ingredients must be involved. For the purposes of this discussion, I will limit this to knowledge creation of one specific topic only (i.e. Java programming). First, an individual needs to have some base knowledge and through combination of new findings and materials, new knowledge is created. Combination in this case does not necessary need to come in the form of individual exploration but can be in the form of exchanging ideas and knowledge between friends, colleagues and almost anything under the sun. For an organisation, to gain new knowledge, they can either 1) invest in their employees (through the above) and 2) Hire new people with new experiences.

In this part, social networking enables unprecedented power to explore a network that allows the exchange of ideas which can lead to new knowledge creation. However, this does not mean that when you find the right person, that person would actually be willing to help.

Different types of knowledge
There are four main types of knowledge in an organisation 1) Individual explicit knowledge, 2) Individual tacit knowledge, 3) Enterprise explicit knowledge and 4) Enterprise tacit knowledge. I would assume that whoever that is reading this understands the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge, if not read this or this. So what I am proposing here is that each employee knows something and some part of the organisation and its practices and processes. Collectively, through some storage system (i.e. Knowledge management systems), the organisation stores this information and make it searchable. We must understand that unless that information is stored and made searchable, the information that each individual have within the organisation is only valid for as long as the employee is valid. Also, the information that is stored would be predominately explicit knowledge and enterprise tacit knowledge would be pretty much the work habits, culture and business processes.

In this part, Enterprise 2.0 provides the collaborative platform of consolidating all the information from around the company. The collective intelligence of (hopefully but not realistic) everything that is known by all employees in the organisation would be stored on the collaborative platform and everything will be searchable.

From the above, you can see that Enterprise 2.0 changes the way an organisation collects new knowledge and how it stores the knowledge and therefore changing the way organisations would approach Knowledge Management in future.

by Sean Lew