Library clips

My post on ways other than email to communicate content, focused on a few social aspects of communicating and collaborating in the workplace:

- use the right communication vehicle for the right context
- content is open, shareable, archived, searchable, tagged…compared to email silos
- your inbox is not inundated, instead you can subscribe to content…kind of like a different inbox for a different types of content
- types of content has it’s own place

I also mentioned Toby Redshaw and his Motorola podcasts.

Here are some brief notes and thoughts from an email I shared with some work colleagues and managers….yeah I know, I shared these links and thoughts in an email, just the point, people not in this email don’t know of its existence. If I shared it in a blog post, some manager in a different office in a different country might have seen it and got excited…BTW, no-one responded to my email. It seems everyone is too busy with work tasks, but learning and education is essential so you can work more productive and collaborative, but people don’t have time to learn these new fundamentals.

Here is the main part of my email re-printed from 28/06/2007

This email is notes from 2 Motorola podcasts about the social enterprise.

STATS
May 2005 - Mar 2006 - 2000 wikis and 2700 blogs
May 2006 - Mar 2007 - 3300 wikis and 4200 blogs (40,000 posts), 2400 forums (28,000 enquiries and responses)
*Some are short lived blogs and wikis eg. blogs focused around a problem or project blogs

63,000 of the 69,000 employees use this system weekly
4000 active staff (5-10% are contributors and authors)
* I suppose a tech based company may be more web savvy than a engineering company

ADOPTION
- What is most surprising is they didn’t have a roll-out, training or communications, they just turned it on and it propogated from the connectors, mavens and word of mouth. He says the quality of software and adoption is inversely proportional to the thickness of the manual.
- 250 part-time Knowledge Champions that facilitate, promote, guide and manage each domain
* I think this is due to ease of use of these tools, publishing and commenting on blog posts is very basic, and becomes viral as people can publish their thoughts within minutes and as discussion occurs

STRATEGY
- A business has 4 components: people, physical assets, cash and knowledge…nowadays most competitors have the first 3, but the competitive edge is leveraging the knowledge that people have to share around these assets and others.

EXAMPLE
- A knowledge worker may bump into someone in the lunch room
- Turns out they give you insight to a task you are working on (as they have worked on related stuff)
- As a result of this knowledge interchange, eg. you have now increased the quality of your work by 15% and cut 4 months off the lifecycle of the task…saving money
- This has less chance of happening if you ate lunch at your desk, or if those people work in a different office/country or they have left or retired from the company
- You no longer need to know these people as you can bump into them and their content online with social tools such blogs, wikis, forums, etc…where the true knowledge worker corporate memory resides
- This bumping into the person in the lunch room has increased enormously, is archived and is searchable
- This enabler of social capital allows a company to be big and agile, rather than big and slow

* Creating a word document and filing it in a Document Management System (DMS) to share thoughts, questions, answers and insights is cumbersome and just doesn’t have the same effect, whereas the CoP tools and social software are more aligned to publishing and sharing personal knowledge and adding value by discussion, and also a sense of place, findability and collaboration on a subject matter.

* With social software you not only get the final product, you get all the workings out, ie. the discussions and postings on how you got there, and people involved.
The fact you can share personal thoughts and discussions is the closest thing to tacit knowledge extraction (besides physical interaction, like mentoring, apprentice, shadowing), as we can grow with the content and learn daily, and slowly assimilate…rather than here’s a final product, where you just can’t get a feel for it.

eg.
A worker is retiring and writes a comprehensive document about all facets of their job

What if you had this additional insight to help you understand this document and this person
- throughout the workers time with the company they shared personal knowledge in a blog (and project blogs), bookmarks, forums, Q & A, view their profile to see an overview of what they have worked on, etc…

I guess, sharing some emails would also help, and perhaps video interviewing, but I’m just comparing written information.

MEASURE
- Motorola now have a less chance of decisions being based on narrow knowledge
* I think it may make decision making a bit more transparent, more quiet people will be heard, not afraid to ask dumb questions, enable cross-disciplinary discussions, etc…
- Don’t relive past mistakes and the good old one, don’t re-invent the wheel
- Increase quality of work and cycle time, thus save money

* I really don’t know of a way to measure this type of thing, how do you get a ROI on how the telephone helps do business (maybe a bad comparison).
One way is the Storytelling method used in the Most Significant Change technique
Or what about Return on Change.

Note

This email is over 3 months old, and that’s a long time in the growth period of km 2.0, a lot of discussion has taken place, so I plan to publish a post with some updated discussion on adoption, culture, measurement, etc…

Related:
km 2.0 and organic km
Enterprise social sharing structure
Where does email fit in document collaboration?
Internal communication blogs and km2.0
The different ways of finding experts
KM 2.0 momentum