New technologies for knowledge sharing

https://fcw.com/blogs/lectern/2016/03/kelman-social-intranets.aspx

Steve Kelman Mar 28, 2016 at 4:38 PM

Ines Mergel report from the IBM Center for the Business of Government, called The Social Intranet: Insights on Managing and Sharing Knowledge Internally.

co-locating subject-matter experts

traditional technologies have important limitations

when teaching about efforts many agencies are making to break down functional stovepipes, which often involves having functional experts spend significant time in offsite cross-agency teams with “functionals” from other specialties. This has a number of advantages, but creates risks that employees won’t have anywhere to go to get answers to questions or refresh their knowledge base. My students and I also discussed communities of practice, which allowed employees to ask questions to fellow experts not at the same location.

“social intranet” — a one-stop shop where agency employees can go to find or request information in a number of different ways to help them do their jobs. The social intranet consists of wikis; places for people to go to ask questions or solicit collaboration; publicly available conversation threads; central places for blogs; and opportunities for people to create profiles and (in a professional context) “friend” each other. These elements all appear at one web address, with its common home page, to which an employee can link.

These different features work in different ways. Wikis, for example, allow a group of employees to add knowledge to a text that is then accessible to the whole organization — and to which everyone can edit and add. Other employees can subscribe to the updates. Blogs, on the other hand, allow longer text to provide project updates, comment on industry developments, or introduce new issues more transparently than blast e-mail updates can manage.

Most intranet collaboration platforms do not require an approval chain to publish, which lowers the barriers to quick sharing. And while the personal profiles and “friending” often start by providing occasions for social conversations, the intention is for these to be a gateway to knowledge sharing; Mergel quotes a manager as saying, “The social feeds into the professional.”