The Business Creative

What a treat I got this past Monday morning when I opened up the Wall Street Journal and saw a special section with the headline teaser, “Knowledge Management: Who Knows What?” The special insert, a collaboration with MIT Sloan Management Review focused on a few topical slices of business management categories like operations, marketing, and human resources. As soon as I turned to the knowledge management article and saw the subhead “Blogs and Wikis,” I was in. The article was a good introduction to the concept of the social workplace and how popular social technology–and the ability to search them–should help employees of big organizations identify internal experts. However, for an article like it, given the paper’s broad and general business audience, I thought it could have done a better job highlighting the benefits of social technologies for businesses of all sizes and underscoring some of the dominant benefits of social technology at work.

It’s true, businesses are often–and I would argue better for being–a constantly changing gene pool of experiences, interests, relationships, expertise, knowledge, and understanding. People come and go, and with that is the reality that a business is also constantly changing. Businesses have responded to this unfixed nature of humans by fixing in place the artifacts of humans working within their business–like data, processes, and policies. But those artifacts merely serve as parameters and guidelines; good things, certainly, but traffic lanes don’t drive the car.

Which brings us to the new dimension in work that’s really not new at all. Knowledge work, in particular, has always been social. Whether in meetings or seminars or at the water cooler, we’re constantly exchanging ideas and information. Social technologies, though, are newish. Technology manifests the social aspects of work that have always existed, and it rapidly expands and extends the reach of our social nature. Now, software like wikis, blogs, and social networks allow us to capture thoughts, ideas, insights, and understandings in real-time; immortalize, archive, and search them; build on and move them forward; and, connect and integrate them beyond our own networks. The beauty is that every organization of any size with existing computers and free, open-source software, can create dynamic, easy-to-use, attractive repositories for its people to collaborate and think in a way that the organization retains the knowledge exchange at any level–not just a from a few ordained specialists, experts often unattached to execution. The transparency creates a de facto knowledge transfer that increases effectiveness by displaying what has already been considered, tried, and lessons learned.

Organizational knowledge that is lives and is made accessible is key. Traditional methods of storing information, i.e., emails, file cabinets, documents buried in hierarchical directory structures on servers, bury information. These methods reinforce a culture of work silos and self-reliance: whatever you or your team knows you can activate on. Social technology reinforces a working culture of sharing and community. Of course, for the benefits to be realized, the organization has to create and incentivize the consistent use of the tools, and the people have to actual do it; the ubiquity of our digital work seems to make that a very crossable bridge.

Way back in 2005, when I worked for a small, boutique creative staffing business, I implemented my preferred wiki of choice, Confluence, to a group of about 20 non-technical professionals across two offices. With the backing of the agency ownership, we used the Confluence instance as the hub for all internal communications, i.e., meeting agendas, sales reporting, email and advertising campaigns, job posting copy, changes in labor laws, forms, et. al. Anecdotally, within this small, close-knit group after just a couple months, it made a clear and tremendous improvement in operational follow through, increased workflow, and a marked increase in a sense of belonging and accountability.

The WSJ article is right on: social technology makes identifying experts within a large organization more readily available. However, the implications of the social workplace is much bigger and more relevant to everyone in knowledge work. Keep an eye on Google Wave and groups like The Dachis Group.