John and five others liked this meeting summary

I started up Outlook.

42 unread messages – typical for a three hour absence from my desk.

I quickly scanned the list to see if anything warranted urgent attention.

One email stood out – from my boss. It was a forwarded complaint from a customer with an added directive : “Please summarize the current situation and provide your recommendation for the best course of action”.

I recalled having answered a similar request a year and a half ago. I searched through my email archive and found the relevant mail. A few minor changes to bring the information up to date, and the response was in my Boss’s Inbox within half an hour.

I have worked for the same organisation for the last 9 years. During this time I have amassed thousands of incoming and sent emails. They are all organized in PST files – one for each quarter. Naturally, amongst these thousands of emails there are tens (maybe hundreds) which are still of economic value to the company. They include correspondence that lead to important business decisions, previous versions of documents, approvals and sign-offs by various departments, strategic papers that were ignored at the time, etc.

Some of these are duplicated in the network file system or filed in paper form. Others are not, partly due to lack of time, and partly because  they didn’t seem particularly important at the time. They are indexed based on a unique system which resides in one place – my brain.

If and when I leave the company, all this information will be lost !!

Like me, there are hundreds or thousands in every big organisation.

I believe that the solution to this problems lies in importing the habits and processes that govern social media on the Internet. Furthermore, I believe that we are on the verge on a revolution in this area.

When this change reaches maturity, intra-organizational knowledge management processes will be entirely different from what they are today.

Today, most written communication within the enterprise is based on “pushing” content to specific people via email. In future, content will be “published” to a shared repository, and co-workers will “invited” to access it, in the same way that social networks operate.

We will collaborate on documents using a Facebook-stlye internal network. We will tweet urgent messages, such as schedule updates or last minute meeting room changes. Complex business issues will be discussed and resolved using a collaborative tool not unlike Google Wave. Meeting Summaries will be published to a shared site and will be automatically linked to a task management system, allowing status tracking. We will be encouraged to post new ideas on the company’s internal network and co-workers will be encouraged to comment and even to further develop those ideas. Those of us who are most creative will have the opportunity to post videos to a You Tube-like internal video sharing site, in order to further illustrate a business idea.

Obviously the much loved and trusted email will not disappear. It will still be used to contact specific people. But increasingly, emails will not contain the actual content, but rather a link to a shared repository.

There are some interesting up-and-coming start-ups in this space. Yammer, has developed a platform for enterprise micro-blogging, a-la Twitter. Spigit allows employees collaborate on innovative projects. Chatter is like a corporate version of Facebook.

Clearly, knowledge management and sharing within an organization is not a new concept. Most large corporations already have an Intranet site, a corporate portal or a knowledge management site. Some companies have more than one infrastructure, and typically these separate site are managed independently by different units. It has been my experience that these solutions hardly manage to capture even a small percentage of the collective wisdom of the enterprise. Maintaining them is considered a chore or an overhead, and they are usually managed by dedicated employees or by a small number of workers on a voluntary basis.

I believe the main reason for this is that the emphasis is typically on the content, which is usually organized by topic, project of organizational unit.

What social networks manage to do very well, in my opinion, is to focus on the individuals who contribute and their social connections. This helps make the investment in content creation personally very rewarding, and it also provides an excellent vehicle for self promotion (in a positive sense).

Of course there are risks to implementing this type of change within the corporation and various challenges have to be overcome.

For starters, significant change to the corporate culture is required. Knowledge is power, and employees tend to resist giving up too much information.

Companies will have to setup schemes which provide incentives for knowledge sharing. On public websites and social networks, various paramaters have evolved which measure a person’s popularity on the net, such as number of twitter followers, number of facebook fans, visits to blog etc. Similarly, employees will be assessed internally based on measures such as amount of content shared or no. of positive responses from colleagues. In a sense, this new approach will help managers. It will enable them to identify experts. It will allow them to pinpoint those specific employees who are constantly developing and/or implementing new ideas and creating real value for the company. It will shed light on the way information is shared and expose informal teams structures that have evolved.  It will help in breaking down barriers between units operating in separate silos.

Secondly, information security is a major issue. Often, knowledge need only be exposed to specific individuals within the company. Corporations will have to setup sophisticated mechanisms which limit access to content areas by organizational unit or hierarchical status. They will have to develop clear guidelines and procedures in this space. Having said that, I believe that this approach has its advantages from an information security perspective. A document sent to the wrong recipient is an irreversible action. The document will forever be in his or her inbox. However, granting  someone access to a shared document can be reversed. As long as the other party has not yet accessed the document, no damage has been done. Even if the other party has managed to access the document, cancelling the entitlement can minimize further damage in the long term.

Its a well worn cliche that real business doesn’t take place in the boardroom but rather next to the water cooler or in the smoker’s corner. I am constantly surprised by the number of instances in which I was able to prevent a business problem from occurring simply by eavesdropping on a colleague’s conversation (open space does have its advantages). I often wonder how many of these conversations did I miss and what might the impact have been if I had. Social networking provides a way to formalize and organize this chatter in order to turn it into a valuable asset. In the not too distant future, the Workstream (as in Lifestream) will become one of the key managerial tools available to the corporation. Those companies who adopt early will reap the benefits. As an added side benefit, they will be able to attract highly talented Y-generation employees, from whom using social networks is as routine as brushing their teeth.