One day, Donald Rippert, Chief Technology Officer of Accenture, wondered why it was easier for a teenager to find an ameteur video on YouTube than it was for one of his experienced consultants to find a corporate presentation in his corporate document repository [1].
This paradigm is something I grapple with on a daily basis. Organisations, including my own, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on document management, records management, and knowledge management systems, and long periods of time developing a corporate taxonomy for naming intellectual capital, only to find that no one can find the information they’re looking for. Yet, there are systems driven by people that contain hundreds of times more information, that are easier to use, easier to navigate around, easier to find stuff in, and easier to create and re-use knowledge in.
There’s a simple lesson to be learned here. Most often, organisations believe they need to control knowledge and information, standardise its classification, turn it into a one-size-fits-all solution, in order for it to be findable by everyone. What we’ve learned from the social computing revolution, from websites like Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us and of course Wikipedia, is that if you hand over control, if you allow people to tag content, easily and freely create content, cross-reference content, and re-use content, if you allow your knowledge to be “free and nakey“, you could actually achieve that goal you were looking for — easily findable knowledge without the cost or overhead.
…this is the real world of knowledge management and social computing could be the enabler you’re looking for.
M
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[1]. Social Computing Magazine (2007) Tagging and Social Search Drove Accenture’s Adoption of Enterprise 2.0. 25 June. Online at: <
www.socialcomputingmagazine.com>, accessed on 26 June 2007.
27 June, 2007 at 11:43 am
I think social computing can help with the problem, but the underlying problem is the lack of a unified/federated/enterprise search.
The information is stored in underlying systems and databases that are not searched or indexed in the same way as other systems. My organization (like many) suffer from silos of search. You can search the intranet, you can search the document repository, you search the deal rooms. But you cannot search them all at the same. You end up having to run a series of searches and never know where to start for the best information.
27 June, 2007 at 11:59 am
@Doug: Mine also has silo-syndrome - as did just about every other place I can think of that I worked for.
I think one thing we can learn from social software (with this issue in mind) is that everything is available to everyone. There is no such thing as ‘my’ information or ‘your’ information. Social software is about sharing, so its all ‘our’ information.
This level of freedom, this level of accessibility, is, I think, one thing that can torpedoe the silo mentality.
As you rightly point out, though, enterprise search can also help a lot!
M
27 June, 2007 at 9:12 pm
I agree, but getting to the stage of social computing in an organization seems like a long way off….
- Arjun
10 July, 2007 at 7:04 pm
[...] a story about social computing in a typical government agency — of a recommendation to leverage existing folk taxonomies, [...]