Intranet Design: Put Management of Your Company's Knowledge in Employees' Hands

I have often advocated on this blog for introducing user-generated content tools into your intranet environment. Your organization will benefit if you give employees a way to share their expertise, knowledge and experience with each other on tools like blogs, microblogging platforms and wikis.

User-generated content = good.

But today I am advocating for an even more important element that is often overlooked in intranet design: User-generated context.

I've been moved to this way of thinking after reading Andrew McAfee's new book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges. One of the most interesting ideas in the book, for me, is McAfee's discussion of how a collection of individual actions can yield group level benefits.

To explain that idea McAfee describes how Google developed a new paradigm for determining the value and relevance of Internet content. Google doesn't rely on human beings to analyze and categorize Internet content (as Yahoo! did in the early days), and it doesn't rely on an AltaVista-like "spider" approach in which the search engine crawls across the Web reading meta tags to determine what each page was about. The first model clearly is not scalable, the latter makes it too easy to lie to the search engine by putting in bogus meta tags that make your page appear higher in the results.

Wanting to return more reliable and relevant search results, Google developed an entirely different approach. Google based it's search results not simply on what people said their page was about, but by paying attention also to how many people had linked to a given page. Google's assumption: The more links to a page, the more valid and the more valuable the content on that page must be.

And that's the idea of individual action delivering group level benefits: individuals, one at a time, without knowledge of one another, chose to link to a given Web page. It happened one link at a time, but in the aggregate it proved a significant indication that the page being linked to was valuable. The structure of results we all see when we search using Google is the group level pattern that emerges as a result of the multiple individual links made.

It should be your goal to create a similar opportunity with your intranet. To realize the value of Enterprise 2.0 you have to put context control over your company's professional knowledge into the hands of employees. Each employee must be empowered to add to the knowledge base by expressing the ideas that they think are important. But letting them express ideas is not enough. To really achieve group-level benefit from these individual acts of expression you need to do three things:


1) Increase the number of employees who can engage with the content their colleagues create (tear down the walls -- more about this in my next post)
2) Allow any person engaging the content to link to it, to tag it (think delicious.com for the enterprise) and by doing so, create relationships between that content and content of their own, or other content posted elsewhere on the intranet
3) Reveal to the organization the links the community has established between pieces of content and the associated tags the community has created

These actions by individual users build a context around the ideas that no appointed editor or knowledge manager will ever be able to establish as well. An editor simply will never see all the ways an idea connects to other ideas -- those connections are only visible when ideas are filtered through experience, and an editor only has his or her own experience through which to filter. But when you allow each member of a community to filter each idea through their individual experience, to identify and create the links they feel are appropriate, then aggregate the many individual connections into a collectively-derived context for each piece of content, that's when you really begin to get lasting benefit out of the knowledge collected in your intranet.

User-generated content = good
User-generated context = better

4 Benefits of Social Computing: Do Companies Know They Need These?

In October of 2009 I spoke to an audience of HR professionals at the Society for Human Resource Managers (SHRM) Strategy Conference in Phoenix, AZ on the topic of developing a social computing strategy for their businesses (look here to see what I told them). I recently received my evaluations from that session and among the comments submitted by the audience was this one:

Interesting talk. But I'd like to hear more about how social computing applies in regular businesses.

What does "regular businesses" mean? I didn't have the opportunity to ask the person who'd written that, so I'm left to draw my own conclusions. I assume he/she meant businesses that are not technology companies. Assuming that's what the person meant, they might be interested in this article over at Read Write Web: Facebook In the Factory: Manufacturers Want Social Software Too. Manufacturers, the article points out, are becoming the "surprise adopters" of social computing. For example, wikis for recording best practices and capturing knowledge of departing engineers are big with these companies. Manufacturing is a pretty "regular" business, right?

But that question -- how does social computing apply to regular businesses -- is still nagging at me. The implication of the question is that social computing is a tool the benefits of which are only applicable to some organizations. When I couple that question with the findings of theblueballroom's study of social computing use in internal communication efforts which found that email, newsletters and posters still rule the corporate communications roost I'm left asking a fundamental question of my own:

Are the benefits that social computing can deliver benefits that the majority of organizations have yet to realize are benefits they need?

I'll explain.

Here's the list of the top four uses of social computing from theblueballroom's study:

1. Sharing knowledge

2. Building community

3. Collaborating during projects across departments + offices

4. Communicating quickly across the business

The benefit of social computing is that all of these things become, if not easier, than certainly more active, more robust and faster in organizations that employ social computing. I therefore see these as benefits, as well as uses.

Sharing knowledge has always happened in business: people talk in the lunch room, office mates turn in their chairs to help each other solve problems. But do companies realize that knowledge sharing needs to evolve from a point-by-point happenstance to the level of corporate strategy?

Community building has always happened in businesses: colleagues become friends, social interaction in addition to work defines people's experience with their company. But consciously creating, cultivating and nurturing communities with the company? Is that something that businesses, on the whole, understand is important to their success today? It still seems to me that a lot of businesses feel like community is OK as long as it doesn't detract from production, but they don't yet see community as a strategic goal they want to dedicate a lot of time and resource to, nor do they see community's contribution to better, more efficient and higher quality production. And for that reason, selling the idea of social computing as a way of jump-starting the formation of community within your organization remains a hard sell.

You're selling an outcome that isn't in demand.

Same with the idea of collaborating across departments and communicating across the company. Both seem to still exist in the realm of mistaken perceptions:

1. The perception that the increased information sharing and increased transparency that accompanies both activities weakens rather than strengthens the organization.

2. The perception, when it comes to communication across the company, that as long as management's message is regularly pushed out to the employees then the communication hurdle has been cleared, regardless of the fact that management isn't listening to understand the reaction by employees to the messages communicated

3. The perception, with regard to collaboration, that contained, team-centered collaboration is the zenith of possibility for collaboration within the company or that to cultivate a different, wider, more asymmetrical collaboration model is somehow dangerous and an economically suspect pursuit.

To deny the need for the kinds of benefits that social computing can bring to an organization is to rest on your laurels within an environment in which you increasingly do not know what your organization knows.

And what are the consequences of that blindness? Morton Hansen has a very interesting analysis of that question in the context of the latest intelligence failures around the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Flight 253.

Whenever I encounter business leaders who scoff at the idea of social computing as a necessary part of their employee engagement strategy (which I've written about here), or as part of their internal communications strategy or as just a part of their business operations in general, I wonder if they retain any perception of how they, themselves, have gotten to where they are. No one advances in life by closing themselves off from community -- quite the contrary, we succeed based on the number and the value of the connections we make. And if we, as part of a group, can forge connections that bring new ideas, new opportunities, new energy into the group, then the group's success is improved. Why, then, do business leaders feel it's wise to deny their employees opportunities to forge more (and richer, more valuable) connections with each other?

When they deny those opportunities, it's a resource embargo -- they're starving the group, but the group is their own company.

Will we look back at the skeptics of this era and find that many of them, if they did not change, went extinct?

Internal Communications: What Is Social Computing's Role?

The top 5 tools currently used for internal company communications (as of October 2009) are as follows:

EMAIL: 92.4%
FACE-TO-FACE MEETINGS: 89.4%
INTRANET: 81.2%
NEWSLETTER: 65.9%
POSTERS: 62.4%

This data comes from an interesting report on social media use in internal company communications titled "Social Media and You..." and produced by theblueballroom (just an aside, but, really guys? The blue ball room? You're going with that as a company name? OK, ok, I'll go along since you're research is interesting...)

The data above provides, I think, a dose of realism for social computing enthusiasts like me who dream of seeing email eliminated as an internal company communications tool to be replaced with more emergent tools and practices like social networking and microblogging.

Now 32.7% of the companies studied for this report are using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter (or custom internal versions of these tools) primarily for sharing knowledge (78.3%) and building communities (69.6%). But when posters outrank social computing as an internal communication tool, it becomes obvious that social computing still has a lot of ground to make up. I think part of that ground includes a better understanding among the people doing the internal communications about why, where and how to apply social computing tools.

It's not my purpose in this post to answer those questions, or even to pursue at length the argument that social computing is a viable alternative (and improvement) to the communication tools currently holding sway. I believe it is a way to better achieve some of the strategic goals of internal company communications, but I want to engage the reality that it isn't yet displacing legacy approaches in significant numbers by articulating the realistic questions that proponents of social computing should be asking themselves in light of these findings:

1. What is it about the current leading tools that makes them the leading tools? Is it just that companies have grown accustomed to them or are they really more useful than they're given credit for in the current climate of excitement over the next new thing?

2. What is the proper role of social computing in a company's internal communication strategy? Is it to replace previous tools and do better the same things those tools were trying to accomplish, or were there internal communication needs that previously went unmet that now could be addressed using the new tools of social computing -- not as replacements, but to augment legacy tools like email, face-to-face and posters?

It's interesting to note that the five leading tools above fall into what appear to me to be two distinct categories: targeted and broadcast:

TARGETED:

Email

Face-to-face

BROADCAST:

Intranet

Newsletter

Posters

People like to use email because they feel they can reach exactly the person they have in mind and I think they like the "attachment" functionality that gives them the peace of mind of knowing they've handed off their document to exactly the person who should have it. But email's effectiveness breaks down quickly, in my experience, when you don't know precisely who you should be talking to. Why posters are so popular in 2009 is a mystery to me. Maybe people like posters because there are times when you have something the organization should hear, but you may not know precisely the audience for that content -- so you post it where all can see it and the people who need it, you hope, will find it. Although, of course, you really have no assurance that actually happens.

But it's also interesting to note that, with the exception of face-to-face, all of these are push communication styles: I push email to you; I push information out onto the intranet; I push a poster or a newsletter for you to consume. To me, the necessity and opportunity of social computing as a corporate communication tool is revealed by the strong showing of face-to-face. People want to have productive back-and-forth exchanges with precisely the right people who can help them and a face-to-face conversation does that. But what about when you are not in the same physical location and yet you need to collaboratively exchange expertise with someone else, or a group? That's when social computing tools can fit the bill because they are web-based approximations of the face-to-face dynamic.

Finally, it's interesting to me that there's an implication in the reliance on push communication technologies that I think is worth addressing. When these tools are used to communicate corporate messages to the employee population, they imply a finality to the thinking contained in the messaging -- they do not invite debate, collaboration, response or input. There are times when, in fact, corporate is not inviting input or debate and so a one-way, push approach can be appropriate. But what about times when that's not the implication you want to communicate, times when you do want input from the organization? Such cases are ones in which social computing tools might be the appropriate choice because they tend to invite people in rather than just push information out and because they seem, in my mind, to occupy a space between pure targeted and pure broadcast communication.

More to come as I make my way further through this study. But what is your experience? Does your company use social computing tools for company communication purposes? Where does it work? Where does it not? What's the right balance between push and social?

(photo above by Eve Fraser Hulsey)

Social Computing as an Engagement Tool: The Enterprise 2.0 Relationship/Engagement Virtuous Cycle

As I mentioned in my previous post, last Thursday I participated on a panel at the Interop New York conference entitled “The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise”. Moderator Steve Wylie asked all the panelists to speak to the value of social messaging within an enterprise – what is its purpose? What benefit can it deliver?

Our first responses to those questions centered on social messaging as a new tool for knowledge management. Tony Byrne of CMS Watch spoke, for example, of the value of being able to find within an organization the person with the answer you need and being able to go directly to that person rather than having to broadcast your need in the hopes that someone somewhere in the organization will happen upon your question.

Social messaging, because it allows you to build around you a network of people you have identified as having relevant expertise, and because it allows you to easily filter activity streams and online exchanges for relevant information can dramatically increase the speed with which an employee can access the expertise they need and also increase the depth of expertise and experience they have easily at their fingertips.

So, no doubt about it, social messaging can be a solution accelerator in an organization.

But there is another intriguing benefit to social computing – messaging, networking, blogs, wikis, the whole gamut – that intrigues me: social computing as an employee engagement tool.


Social Computing as an Employee Engagement Tool

So many discussions about social computing in the enterprise turn on the question of return on investment (ROI). In the context of this discussion I want to advocate for a different idea of which investment it is on which social computing can help you achieve a good return. I think when it comes to social computing in the enterprise, employees are the "I" in ROI.

We all understand that there are significant costs to recruiting, onboarding, equipping, training and providing benefits for employees. I have employees and I don’t begrudge them that investment – it’s critical – but the reality is that for the health of the organization I have to be wise about how I make those investments and that includes making sure that employees in whom I’ve invested want to (and do) stick around for a long time.

This diagram illustrates an idea I’ve been formulating that I call the "Enterprise 2.0 Relationship/Engagement Virtuous Cycle”.

It’s really a simple concept that draws on four ideas:

1. That employee retention is more likely when employees are engaged.
2. That employees are more likely to be engaged when they feel appreciated.
3. That employees are more like to feel appreciated in organizations in which they have opportunities to contribute ideas and demonstrate their expertise, and
4. That employees are more likely to take advantage of opportunities to contribute where there is established trust that makes them feel safe doing so

The last two points bring us around to enterprise social computing. Social computing gives employees opportunities to create content for the organization through blogs, wikis, podcasts, videos, link sharing and other activities. It gives employees opportunities to reveal their expertise in the process. That content they produce becomes a resource to the rest of the organization and as their ideas are picked up and used by others around them, employees get to see a direct connection between their activities and the success of the company – which, I should add, is one of the most critical elements to employee satisfaction: knowing how what they do matters.

But if you build your social computing tools just around a goal of collaboration and knowledge management, while those are noble goals, I contend they will fail unless collaboration and knowledge sharing are seen as a by-product of achieving a more fundamental goal: creating relationships. Because the critical element in enterprise social computing success is not the presence of the tools, the critical element is your employees feeling comfortable and safe to use the tools for collaboration and knowledge sharing.

And that is the meta idea that the Relationship/Engagement Virtuous Cycle attempts to illustrate. You must create activity in the tools before you’ll get engagement, but without a level of comfort you won’t get the activity you need. Here’s how it works:

If employee participation and engagement are your goals…

• You need to build your social computing tools to facilitate connections between people. Make it possible for people to find others with similar interests and similar experiences and connect with each other. Give them the means to start building relationships within the tools (some of you may argue that relationship building is frivolous, when you’re focusing on relationships you’re not producing. I’ll just ask you to think about your own experience getting things done at work. Idea work gets done by talking and people don’t talk to strangers in the workplace very much or very well. We have to dismantle the society of strangers).
• Where relationships exist, trust begins to grow over time.
• Where trust exists, employees are more likely to collaborate on projects, innovation and idea sharing. This is critical: sharing an idea can be a scary thing for an employee. If they don’t feel safe or don’t trust those around them they may feel like a “wrong” idea will be damaging to them and so not contribute at all. But where there are good relationships, there are safe zones of trust and employees are more likely to collaborate with each othe. And where employees are comfortable collaborating and, therefore, do so, the opportunities increase for them to see their ideas picked up by the organization.
• And where that happens, the employee’s satisfaction increases and their engagement deepens as a result.

Relationships lead to trust, trust leads to collaboration, collaboration leads to engagement.

Knowledge exchange runs on relationships and social computing facilitates those relationships within the enterprise.

That’s how I see it. What are your thoughts?

Interop, New York: The Social Computing Adoption Hurdle From An IT Perspective

I'm at the Interop conference in New York City this week -- a thrill for me because I've never before been to either. Is it strange for me to be excited about an IT conference? Well, so be it. I am excited to be at Interop because it gives me a chance to hear how the IT community is dealing with the challenges of the emerging social computing business model. At other conferences and in other blog posts I've participated in the conversation around how to drive the adoption of social computing inside the enterprise (Enterprise 2.0) -- companies invest in these tools, they want people to use them. It is worth reiterating that the challenge of adoption is not just a technology challenge -- Enterprise 2.0 projects are quite significantly culture change-management projects.

That's true, but they are also technology projects and to that end, here at Interop I was given what I think is an important perspective on why these technologies are not being more widely adopted to date. I was on the panel discussing "The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise". Near the end of the discussion we got into the idea of standards: do standards exist for social messaging tools?" The short answer is "No." One of the audience members then responded that the lack of standards makes it "impossible to adopt these tools" in his estimation. What's his concern? It is about the amount of content being created on the social messaging platform, the fact that some or all of that content might need to be accessible in the future for legal and regulatory reasons and a fear that the vendor his organization settles upon to provide their social computing platform won't survive. If your vendor goes out of business and you can't port your content into a new system because there are no standards, then you essentially lose that content. That's a significant concern for the IT teams that are charged with safeguarding data and it's a big reason that they want to slow down the rush into social computing tools.

And it's something for both vendors and business leaders to think about.

See, I hadn't thought of that concern before I came to Interop, but now I'm privy to it. Discoveries like that are why even an IT conference can be exciting.

Enterprise 2.0: The Importance of Integrated Solutions

I've been keeping one eye on the Twitter feed coming out of the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 going on this week in Las Vegas. This morning I saw Mike Gotta's tweet about point solutions VS enterprise solutions. He said this:

Microsoft keeps creating a straw man argument that you need a platform (SP2010) for social computing vs. point solutions #spc09

But that's a false argument - the question is platform vs. platform not point tools #spc09

But before I go any further, maybe I should define our terms. A "point solution", in my mind, means a tool developed as an independent solution to a specific problem: you want better knowledge sharing, you create a blog on blogger.com. Later you want better collaboration, you set up MediaWiki and create a wiki. Down the road you want to share video content, you get a company YouTube channel. Those are all great tools, but if you approach them in an ad hoc manner you're muddying the waters and losing the benefit of greater content discoverability that is one of the great benefits of Enterprise 2.0.

A platform -- or enterprise -- solution, on the other hand means that you build a foundational infrastructure first within which you can establish blogs when those are needed, wikis when they're called for and a video sharing solution if that's what you need. Those are unique tools, and yet they exist within a connected enterprise software environment so the system is "aware" of them and the content contained in each tool is accessible from the platform environment -- you don't have to log into each tool seperately to search for what you need. SharePoint is an example of an enterprise solution, as is SocialText, SocialCast and Documentum, not to mention the SaaS solutions available from Google and others.

Mike is picking up on Microsoft's framing of the conversation around approaches to Enterprise 2.0. Microsoft's Enterprise 2.0 solution is their SharePoint platform and so they want to frame the debate as being whether you need a platform or one-off style, point solutions. It's to Microsoft's advantage that the debate get settled in favor of platforms. Mike is making the point, if I interpret his tweets correctly, that no one is debating platform VS point solutions, we all recognize the superior value of platforms, the debate is about which platform companies should use.

I agree that platforms are where the real value of Enterprise 2.0 can be realized. I don't agreee, however, that it's a settled question in everyone's minds. I think people and organizations new to Enterprise 2.0 too often do have a tendency to jump to point solutions as a way of getting their feet wet and only realize the importance of integrating their many stand-alone tools later on, once they've gained traction, amassed content and won enthusiasts. It's an easy mistake to make but a costly one to correct.

Better to approach the development of Enterprise 2.0 solutions the same way you approach the building of a house. You might want a house with a really nice master bedroom (there's your specific problem), but you don't buy property and build a bedroom on it. You buy property, build a foundation and build the house on top of that foundation; your master bedroom, then, is one integrated element of the whole house. The foundation and structural elements of the house are your enterprise platform -- they're architected to meet your long-range objectives around comfort, style and function and the individual rooms you include each contribute to those objectives in their own way.

There is, and should be, a debate around which platform is the best one to use. In many respects the answer to that comes down to your objectives: what are you trying to achieve? I often make the point that the shape of the solution should be governed by the nature of the problem. But what is essential to your organization's success with enterprise 2.0 is that you make the effort at the outset of the planning to think not just about the tool you need today, but what you may need later on and build your first tools on a foundation that can accomodate future ones as well.

That's how I see it. What do you think?

SHRM Strategy Conference 2009 -- What I'm Telling HR Professionals About Enterprise 2.0

This week I’m in Phoenix, AZ presenting at the 2009 Society for Human Resource Managers strategy conference. The focus of the conference, which draws between 400-500 HR professionals from all over the United States, is on developing new ideas for the changing HR environment we all face. Economic uncertainty has now been added to a workplace environment already made uncertain by the changes in the demographic makeup of the workforce, changes to where those workers are located, not to mention changes to how and when they work.

My presentation is titled “Next Generation HR: Building and Implementing a Technology Strategy for the New HR Environment”. And here’s what the brochure advertises for my session: “Ethan Yarbrough will discuss how to design and implement workplace technology solutions and business cultures to help organizations operate effectively within the context of a rapidly evolving business environment; the next generation workplace. A new generation of employees is entering the workforce, social computing/2.0 technologies are being adopted in business, and employees are demanding more flexible work environments and corporate data is growing.”

Now this HR audience already knows far too well about the challenges of the current workplace, they live it every day. But I feel I need to mention it because I want to put it in the context of how Enterprise 2.0 can, potentially, mitigate some of the challenges. You’ll note that I consciously used the word “mitigate”, meaning “reduce, lessen, or decrease” and not the word “solve”: “to find an answer or a solution”. I do that because I don’t believe Enterprise 2.0 can, as your only strategy, solve all the challenges inherent in the next generation workplace. It has to be part of an overall cultural approach that changes the company into one that better matches the ways in which people are going to be working in the years ahead. As I see it, Enterprise 2.0 will not, by itself, solve the challenges, but the challenges can’t be solved if Enterprise 2.0 isn’t one element of your strategy.

I further believe – and have mentioned on this blog before – that HR must take a leading, strategic role in developing and implementing Enterprise 2.0 strategies. HR is one of the few divisions within most companies that has a company-wide horizontal reach. As such, HR has a significant impact on the practices and the culture of the company. IT has a similar reach and a similar impact on behaviors, but at it’s heart the challenge of introducing Enterprise 2.0 successfully is not an IT challenge, it is a cultural challenge and HR, more often than IT, is the keeper of the culture.

That said, here are the main points I want to get across to the SHRM audience this week:

1.     Why Enterprise 2.0? Because Enterprise 2.0 creates a foundation for knowledge preservation and new knowledge creation. It leverages the tools and practices of Web 2.0, including user generated content, social networking, greater information sharing, more information collection and more relevance-driven information discovery. The result is stability and progress even in an environment where people are working more remotely – the “out-of-sight workforce” is what HR folks call it – where a huge population of workers is leaving and likely will walk out of the organization with a lot of critical company knowledge in their heads and where you succeed by having both better and faster innovation than the competition. Enterprise software and the 2.0 practices you build upon it can be equated with your body’s central nervous system: it is the central nervous system of your organization. It sends signals, it receives signals, it tells you what signals to react to. I want HR professionals to ask themselves who is sending signals in their organization and are they receiving them?

2.   Uses for Enterprise 2.0? I’m going to make an attempt in my presentation to move the conversation off of the purely theoretical and on to the practical. Once I’ve told you why you should do Enterprise 2.0, you’re naturally going to want to know what you can do with it. Here are some ideas:

a. Enhance Company Culture: Want a culture of sharing, collaboration, mutual support and deep employee engagement? Create a social networking environment – with your employee profile system, for example – where people can connect, form groups around whatever they want to so they can build and deepen relationships. Relationships create trust, trust leads to engagement, engagement leads to collaboration and sharing, and that leads to a more informed, more effective workforce, which in turn leads to a more successful company.

b. Foster Collaboration: Yes, I already mentioned collaboration, but that was as a by-product of cultural realignment. Once you’ve created an environment in which people want to collaborate, how do you empower them to do so? Create en Enterprise 2.0 platform that puts the power in the hands of the users, a platform that allows for the ad hoc creation of collaboration tools like blogs and, more so, wikis. I recently worked with an organization that encouraged its employees to collaborate and allowed them to request the creation of Wikis from the platform administrator. That’s an oxymoronic approach: don’t on the one hand tell them to act freely and on the other hand lock down their ability to do so by making them petition an authority. In the case of the company I was working with, they hosted wikis on their intranet and were concerned about under which section it should be hosted. One requested wiki that an employee wanted to use to capture key ideas from a knowledge development summit and continue the collection of ideas was going to take two weeks to create while the administrators restructured the intranet to make a more logical place for the wiki. If you want to foster collaboration, you have to be more agile than that. Give people a place to build what they need, give them the materials and then get out of their way.

c. Knowledge Management: This quote says it all, I think: “If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times as profitable” – Lewis E. Platt, former CEO of HP. I think every company, to one extent or another, has encountered this problem. So many heads thinking so many things, but so little visibility into what those things are. This is the liability for continued innovation made manifest. If you can’t make it known what you know, then for all intents and purposes you know nothing. Giving employees blogs where they can write about their work and, in the process, reveal expertise is one way to address this issue. That will reveal the in-process knowledge, the knowledge in it’s formational stages. For existing knowledge that you want to make more discoverable you should consider RSS feeds, tagging, bookmarking tools and social search.

d. Enhanced Training: HR will always have a role in employee training and development, it’s part of their charter. But as the pace of change increases in business, it becomes increasingly more difficult for HR to keep up with training if they stick to a formal classroom format. Enterprise 2.0 offers a viable alternative that can empower the grassroots employee to contribute more directly to the company’s success by participating in technology-enabled peer-to-peer training. For example, give your employees a platform on which to share training videos that they create; similarly, equip them with an audio podcasting platform. Both allow for the direct delivery of skill-enhancing information in the flow of the employee’s work day. It’s putting the reference library at their fingertips.

That’s all for now. I’m also certainly going to address the issue of Return on Investment – I have 5 key points to make to the HR audience about how to address the ROI challenge. And I’m going to make the point that ROI is, itself, a by-product of adoption. So your focus needs to be on getting people to use the tools you create, a challenge for which I also offer some considerations.

But I’ll tell you about those in my next post.