“The reports of my death are an exaggeration,” the great Mark Twain famously remarked in 1897 upon hearing accounts of his own passing. I’ve been fascinated by recent posts here on CMSWire assessing the health (or lack thereof) of “knowledge management” and debating whether it is dead, dying or will morph entirely with what most people in the CMS Wire community have come to label and know as “social business.” As some have noted, one of the underlying challenges associated with even having this discussion is that definitions around the terms “knowledge management” and “social business” are broad, fluid and in regular flux. That being said, the ongoing debate has been interesting to read and I wanted to throw my hat in the ring, based on some direct perspectives from the front lines:
Within the enterprise, it is becoming impossible to have one without the other
Regardless of exact definitions, as companies try to find their way and their place in the social space, knowledge management and the need for it is NOT going to die. In fact, I believe the needs will only increase as more employees have access and curiosity develops for more information via the continued growth of social collaboration solutions At a base level, this means enterprise search becomes an even more critical part of both knowledge management and social business — empowering employees at all levels to easily and efficiently find the information they’re looking to get. From there, they can deploy this knowledge toward what they do each day.
The perceived decline in knowledge management has happened because of accessibility and because of poorly designed solutions, pure and simple. Rank-and-file employees and even those who specialize in knowledge management cannot easily find the tools, data and documents they need to share information — or worse yet, to function more productively within the enterprise. So for those of us on the social business side of things, there is considerable opportunity — and even a responsibility — to develop solutions that enable employees to more easily search for and find what they need and collaborate more effectively with, or based on the knowledge at-hand. Not to be a broken record, but user experience really matters and this is yet another example of why.
Social business should be about making knowledge management better, not killing it
Just like Microsoft Office made it easy and efficient to bounce between Word and Excel, there is a critical need to make it easier and more efficient for people in the enterprise to access and use knowledge, regardless of platforms As things stand in early 2012, there remains a fundamental inability and challenge to connect-the-dots with and among all different platforms: Yammer, Jive, SharePoint, and others provide so much promise, but the difficulty in navigating or understanding all of them at once can intimidate the most seasoned knowledge management worker, let alone rank-and-file employees. For example, there are a lot of employees who don’t understand how micro-blogging, activity feeds and communities make them more productive, as many rightly see it as a potential distraction to their work at-hand.
The promise for productivity will lie in being able to pull all of these solutions together in ways that make sense and make knowledge sharing and management more efficient and effective than before. There are some promising areas within SharePoint and elsewhere, so we as an industry should be scoping out these possibilities rather than drafting obituaries. It is difficult to imagine how point solutions will fare in the new world of work if they don’t easily communicate with already installed productivity solutions — ie: Office, SharePoint, Lync and Exchange.
Business Developer
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Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com
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