Category Archives: Knowledge Management

Asking the question: GOOD; asking it over and over: BAD – where social engagement in the workplace fails.

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same_tune

Using social tools within the enterprise is a valuable thing. It lets people ask questions to a bigger audience than just those sitting within hearing distance of their desk.

I’ve discussed this in earlier posts (ESS (Enterprise Social Software) – user adoption, and Let’s share!). It’s incredibly valuable to be able to draw on the knowledge of others. That’s why it’s good to be able to ask questions. The answer given helps not just the asker, but can help others, and at the same time, others can add to the answer creating even more value.

Where I feel this all falls down though is that, often, there is no real way to capture that knowledge that came about from the questions asked. Continue reading →

John Mancini's Keynote View of the Digital Future

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John Mancini, President of AIIM International was kind enough to make a zipcast of his info360 keynote presentation slides. This allows him to do “present” his slides. I am very, very grateful that he did this, as I was not able to attend the conference. I was really impressed by John’s comments. I made some “rough” notes. (I call them “rough” because they don’t capture all of John’s message – If you want, scroll to the bottom of this post to see the link to his zipcast.) ============================================================ Rough Notes made from John Mancini’s keynote at Info360 We are in the middle of an interesting technology inflection point —————————————————————- We have been through many phases, each with its content management focus.

  • Mainframe – Batch Transactions
  • Mini – Departmental Processes
  • PC – Documents
  • Internet – Web pages

Effectively what we have done is just taken the old world of paper-based records, ledgers and transferred it to the next phase of technology. This may the the source of some of the challenges that we have. The next iteration after the Internet will be “Social” – a focus on interactions and conversations. The content management focus will be capturing and managing these. John mentions that companies can’t just put a social layer on top of their current processes. They will need to think about the social layer and how they embed it in all of their processes and push it back through our web presences and information repositories so that everything connects up. A system of engagement that just has a front-end social process and nothing else behind it is not enough. John also points out that we need to avoid pushing just old world concepts into this social world. We will need to adapt these ideas, and ways of doing things. The old transactional ideas had to do with control, auditing and securing. This won’t be always possible in the new way. Implications ———— CIO’s will need to approach things differently.

  • Traditionally – Minimise Risk and Reduce Cost.
  • The new is Add Value and Create New Reality

The end of the email era John did an analysis of his e-mail:

  • 46% was actually unwanted (spam);
  • 21% was e-mails to colleagues – these could actually be better addressed with social media;
  • 21% was bac’n (interesting, but not essential, can be deleted without any harm).
  • The only things of real value were the e-mails sent to, and received from, real people outside of the organisation. This accounted for only 6% of total volume.

His point was – we need to think differently about e-mail. This is compounded by the fact that the people coming into the workforce are from the “social” phase, while the people making the decisions are from the “PC” phase. The End of IT autocracy.

  • 10 years – the coolest technology was was you got at work.
  • Now that is reversed.
  • Workplace IT is lagging behind.
  • If a business imperative is important enough, it doesn’t matter how much IT control it, if going outside that control will allow a user to get the job done, people will do it.

Implication of Compounding

  • Information growth will be incredible.
  • At the same time the cost of storage is dropping.
  • However this is not proportional. (Information growth exceeds decrease in cost).

Why we should care ——————-

  • If we ignore this, we will make the same mistakes again. E.g. when e-mail came out, companies considered it a risk, and that it was really only needed for management, etc.
  • However, companies need to embrace this technology to remain competitive. Otherwise there is a risk of a “digital divide”. The longer that it takes, the more difficult it will be.

============================================================== Link to John Mancini’s Zipcast ———————————————–

Related Articles
  • 7 Social Media Statistics That Will Get You Thinking on Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
  • Social Media Use at Work on the Rise
  • Guy Kawasaki – The Art Of Social Media
  • 10 ways to use Zipcast (slideshare.net)
  • SlideShare Brings another collaboration tool to the crowded web conferencing market (zdnet.com)

John Mancini’s Keynote View of the Digital Future

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future_TECH

John Mancini, President of AIIM International was kind enough to make a zipcast of his info360 keynote presentation slides. This allows him to do “present” his slides. I am very, very grateful that he did this, as I was not able to attend the conference. I was really impressed by John’s comments. I made some “rough” notes. (I call them “rough” because they don’t capture all of John’s message – If you want, scroll to the bottom of this post to see the link to his zipcast.) ============================================================ Rough Notes made from John Mancini’s keynote at Info360 We are in the middle of an interesting technology inflection point —————————————————————- We have been through many phases, each with its content management focus.

  • Mainframe – Batch Transactions
  • Mini – Departmental Processes
  • PC – Documents
  • Internet – Web pages

Effectively what we have done is just taken the old world of paper-based records, ledgers and transferred it to the next phase of technology. This may the the source of some of the challenges that we have. The next iteration after the Internet will be “Social” – a focus on interactions and conversations. The content management focus will be capturing and managing these. John mentions that companies can’t just put a social layer on top of their current processes. They will need to think about the social layer and how they embed it in all of their processes and push it back through our web presences and information repositories so that everything connects up. A system of engagement that just has a front-end social process and nothing else behind it is not enough. John also points out that we need to avoid pushing just old world concepts into this social world. We will need to adapt these ideas, and ways of doing things. The old transactional ideas had to do with control, auditing and securing. This won’t be always possible in the new way. Implications ———— CIO’s will need to approach things differently.

  • Traditionally – Minimise Risk and Reduce Cost.
  • The new is Add Value and Create New Reality

The end of the email era John did an analysis of his e-mail:

  • 46% was actually unwanted (spam);
  • 21% was e-mails to colleagues – these could actually be better addressed with social media;
  • 21% was bac’n (interesting, but not essential, can be deleted without any harm).
  • The only things of real value were the e-mails sent to, and received from, real people outside of the organisation. This accounted for only 6% of total volume.

His point was – we need to think differently about e-mail. This is compounded by the fact that the people coming into the workforce are from the “social” phase, while the people making the decisions are from the “PC” phase. The End of IT autocracy.

  • 10 years – the coolest technology was was you got at work.
  • Now that is reversed.
  • Workplace IT is lagging behind.
  • If a business imperative is important enough, it doesn’t matter how much IT control it, if going outside that control will allow a user to get the job done, people will do it.

Implication of Compounding

  • Information growth will be incredible.
  • At the same time the cost of storage is dropping.
  • However this is not proportional. (Information growth exceeds decrease in cost).

Why we should care ——————-

  • If we ignore this, we will make the same mistakes again. E.g. when e-mail came out, companies considered it a risk, and that it was really only needed for management, etc.
  • However, companies need to embrace this technology to remain competitive. Otherwise there is a risk of a “digital divide”. The longer that it takes, the more difficult it will be.

============================================================== Link to John Mancini’s Zipcast ———————————————–

Related Articles
  • 7 Social Media Statistics That Will Get You Thinking on Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
  • Social Media Use at Work on the Rise
  • Guy Kawasaki – The Art Of Social Media
  • 10 ways to use Zipcast (slideshare.net)
  • SlideShare Brings another collaboration tool to the crowded web conferencing market (zdnet.com)

Let’s share! – the benefits of sharing information.

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sharing information and knowledge

The benefits of sharing information and knowledge

In this post, I discuss some of the benefits of sharing information and knowledge within companies, and within teams.

In a post titled Why do people share?, Oscar Berg talks about Information Sharing and the value that this sharing can bring.

Oscar’s blog makes reference to a number of other wonderful articles about the sharing of information. Even though you can read more about them in his blog, I’ll mention them here briefly because they really made me think about the real value there is in sharing.

They were:

  • “Why We Share Information” by Prescott C. Ensign and Louis Heber, MIT Sloan Management Review
  • “Forwarding Is the New Networking” by Tom Davenport
  • “Pay it forward’ pays off”, EurekAlert
  • “‘Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome” by John Tierney, The New York Times:

I recommend that you read them. I found them inspiring.

Benefits

On the whole, the social benefits connected with information sharing seem very positive.

And it is actually best when done altruistically. That is – share for the sake of sharing. Don’t make getting something back a requirement.

In a work environment, sharing relevant and useful information has numerous benefits.

Relevant information could include:

  • A description of  a particular technology that someone is using, or
  • an explanation of how someone solved a particular problem, or
  • a link to a relevant (and I mean relevant) article on the internet, or
  • a summary of a report that someone has read.

On the whole, the social benefits connected with information sharing seem very positive.

The value that this would give would include:

  • Team building
  • A better understanding of something, not only be the recipients, but by the person who sent the information (the best way to learn something is to teach it, or explain it, to others).
  • Build up a reputation (naturally this depends on the quality of the information sent to the others). And not only of the individual, but also of the group as a whole.
  • Increase the overall knowledge of the team.

The examples of relevant information, and the benefits are not exhaustive. There must be many ways to share information and knowledge.

The important thing is that what is shared is relevant, helpful, or adds value.

(Just typing something into a search engine, and then sending the link of the first thing that appears to the others is not valuable. )

Related Articles
  • Why do people share?
  • The Content Economy by Oscar Berg: Why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers
  • Oscar Berg: ‘Collaboration Pyramid’ Improves Enterprise Communication
Would you like to learn more?
Here are some resources that I handpicked fom Amazon…