It’s not a new product or a new app. It’s is a way of thinking about enterprise social networking as a platform for keeping track of your own collections of knowledge, but more importantly, making those collections discoverable, searchable and collaborative.
Here is an example from a past project. Jane (we’ll call her) was following the development and definition of the Basel III reserve requirements. She had set up alerts via Google and was subscribing to relevant feeds to always stay informed of the latest developments. Part of her workflow consisted of filtering the information she received. Perhaps between one and five percent of the alerts pointed to new and relevant information. Her filtering thus increased the relevance of the content. When Jane came across something useful she would print out the article and put it in a binder. Jane often referred to the articles in the binder in the course of her work, and a few colleagues who knew about Jane’s collection would sometimes ask for information related to their work.
With the arrival of an enterprise social network, Jane shifted her workflow from printing and hole punching to storing the articles electronically. Liberating the process from physical constraints had the immediate benefit of speeding up the workflow. Furthermore, Jane could now search her collection electronically so that inquiries could be answered more fully and faster.
The benefits to Jane paled in significance compared with the benefits to the firm as a whole. For starters, the collection was available for colleagues to search without making a request to Jane. Each article or link to an article could be discussed online, enabling people to work together to arrive at interpretations of the content or pointing out obsolete references, thus further improving the value of the collection.
But the biggest benefits to the firm were twofold:
- Those who didn’t know Jane or didn’t know of the collection now had easier ways of discovering the content. Search for LCR (liquidity coverage ratio), say, and you were likely to get results from Jane’s collection of articles. Otherwise, they would notice in their activity streams that colleagues they followed engaged in discussing Jane’s content.
- Others directly or indirectly involved with Basel III started contributing articles and links to the collection. What they shared was a result of their own filtering, scaling the initiative beyond the constraints of a single individual.
To me, the dynamics described here are interesting because they start with the individual and an established process. By using the enterprise social network to store valuable content, filing suddenly equates sharing. Crucially, it required no extra effort on Jane’s part, it even improved her workflow.
Every business has examples of processes where a shift to a social platform is individually rational, and where benefits also accrue to the organization. Your social platform adoption strategy increases its impact if you include use cases like this. Find the people who track what is happening in fields relevant to the business and show them how easy it is to manage their collections on a social platform.
Interested in learning more about how enterprise social networking can enhance knowledge management? Visit our knowledge management section of our blog.
