Sarah Heal from Information Leadership is talking on the use of Web 2.0 tool in business ... based on their experiences using them, what they see with clients, and from KMWorld 2008. See also sarah-heal.com
Knowledge management means: helping people doing a great job. For firms, Web 2.0 helps wrap around expert support and collaboration tools. Need to support more than just information ... but also know-how, peers and experts.
Why do we do this?
- Gen Y ... they are different. They just want the answer. Will take the first answer that comes along. If you can’t give it to them, they’ll move elsewhere.
- Personal web use expectations ... eg, Google, Web 2.0, search ... “why can’t I search inside like I do via Google?”
- Distributed business / virtual teams
- Information overload and time pressures ... 250-300 emails ... how do you get any work done with this much?
Today’s workhorses:
- file shares
- email
- paper
- a “crafted” intranet
- EDRMS
- ... overall, these are not delivering what we need ... know-how, information, collaboration ... so RIP
History:
- 1997-2007 ... fall off in effectiveness of EDRMS, email, file shares, face-to-face
- “age of now” ... “EDRM services”, wikis (eg, training material in wikis, not thick training manuals) and blogs, “good enough repositories”, connection, RSS, IM, search and tagging
KMWorld paper ... 4 biggest disablers of knowledge sharing:
- the intranet
- knowledge managers
- email
- shared drives
Promise ... for tomorrow’s LOB systems and technologies:
- EDRM services ... disaggregation of the “big system” to smaller services
- wikis
- blogs
- RSS
- shared screen services, eg, WebEx
- shared workspaces
- Know-WHO ... Facebook, LinkedIn
Sarah showed the 2008 Content Technology Vendor Map from CMS Watch.
Content pyramid:
- “authoritative” ... controlled documents, eg, contracts, reports
- “instruments and mechanisms” ... templates, workflows, approvals
- “transactional” ... notes, reports, requests, correspondence
- self-help nuggets ... access to short answers for short questions
- information know-how
Why are we doing all this? What’s the big deal?
- healthy information environments
- just in time NOT just in case
- power to the people
- the document links us to the people who wrote them
- feedback improves
- speed and enhanced performance
What choices do we have?
- (1) best of breed vs Swiss Army knife?
- (2) open source, Microsoft or a specialist vendor?
- (3) appliance, cloud, or software?
SharePoint ... Swiss Army Knife, love-hate, massive use, default choice for many
- eg, Oslernet ... law firm in Canada. Millions of documents. Success = designed and governed as though it was an EDRMS ... liked and used.
Open Source ... CapGemini ... Drupal, phpBB, MediaWiki, Google Search Appliance
- 27000 users, 900 communities, 500 forums, 500 wikis
- organic growth ... reduced the use of email
- conclusion: When you deliver the right tools, people will want to use them.
- (biggest challenge in NZ ... hard to support in NZ due to lack of open source specialists, eg, for Alfresco)
If you don’t provide these, then what happens?
- end users find other / better tools
- or they leave the firm
- or they don’t join the firm
Wikis and Blogs in the Enterprise
Wikis:
- Web delivered
- can include approvals
- can do metadata
- very good for living documentation
- helpful in the beginning stages of a project ... when things are forming (which is exactly what I show in Seamless Teamwork)
- it replaces ... Word and PDF manuals, pretty / pointless intranets, email
- why it’s better ... empowers people to contribute, multiple findability, online
Blogs:
- comments and moderation
- web delivered
- metadata and tags
- business uses ... capturing insights, lessons, ideas, how to, rants and raves
- replaces ... documents and memos, knowledge articles, pretty intranet, email
- why it’s better ... people can contribute, creates network of trust, multiple findability, online
Blogs and Wikis together ...
- become a business improvement platform ... for ideas, issues and projects
Social Software
Helps see what other people are reading, thinking and doing.
Take a look at StumbleUpon or Grant’s Flickr photos (“how we plan our vacations”)
What’s the big deal?
- RSS and Alerts
- Social “connect” apps
- distance meeting apps
- collaboration apps, eg, from 37signals
- personal KM apps, eg, Sarah uses Evernote for this
The Challenge
- the content is starting to get tangled up in the technology ... so for record keeping ... makes the job a whole lot harder
- creates a new role and challenges for IM professionals, eg, metadata, taxonomy, folksonomy, governance, processes
The Takeaways
- the rise and fall of technologies
- large scale use already
- it's not going away
More on the conference: see #bs7im on Twitter
Questions and Answers
Q. Is the metadata the key to all this?
A. Two ways ... taxonomy and folksonomy. Some firms are allowing people to start with folksonomy, and then converting some of that to taxonomy after 2 years.
Q. A lot of the newer tools are outside of the firewall ... what are the record keeping implications?
A. Record keepers should be nervous. Will probably need to bring some things inside the firm. Also -- how important are these records to us?
Q. What are the negatives or risks?
A. Disturbs me that people are doing things everywhere ... you need to have information design from the get-go to make this work over the longer term.
Q. What is a record and what isn’t?
A. You have to come back to the business rules. What are the activities that need to become records?
