At the 2010 London Online Information conference, it was once again my privilege to present along with my esteemed colleagues. In the context of barriers to the use of social tools, Phil Bradley outlined 25 typical objections to their use in the workplace and entertainingly furnished the down-to-earth rejoinders; Bonnie Cheuk spoke convincingly of the need to zero in on the business purpose for any social tools initiative and to assist executives in tailoring the use of social tools for their specific communication needs. I had chosen as my focus the matter of ownership: Is there even such a thing when it comes to social tools - and if there is, how could it be used to protect and enhance corporate memory (CM) and knowledge sharing (KS)?
The question regarding ownership arises because social tools in many cases have become a de facto repository of significant aspects of corporate memory and a de facto means for knowledge sharing. If no one "owns" such a mechanism for CM/KS, what is the fate of organizational learning, institutional knowledge, and intellectual capital?
As a result of their very nature, social tools play into the natural creativity of knowledge workers and their tendency to collaborate to rise to any occasion. Thus, the social tools exacerbate the traditional tension between proactively investing in systems and infrastructure to capture CM and facilitate KS on the one hand … and "applying search muscle and heroism" retroactively on the other hand. The number of offerings in the enterprise search market suggests it may be perceived to be too late, in any other than a startup organization, to take the proactive just-in-case approach: The cost of intellectual content management is too difficult to justify in many environments. Similarly, the complexity of devising a mechanism whereby knowledge workers may learn of their colleagues' activities at the right time defies upfront solutions and prescribed processes.
So how can we work the social tools - and the inherent human desire to communicate with peers - to the advantage of CM/KS? What could managers do to encourage practices and behaviors that will benefit the collective memory and access to knowledge? It is well known how actions that are rewarded get repeated; what rewards will strengthen the likelihood a knowledge worker will take the extra two minutes to contribute an insight into the communal heritage - given the typical time pressures they experience? Is it feasible to design and institutionalize a certain set of practices (over and above, let's say, the document/records management systems imposed by the regulatory environment)? How does one foster a culture in which everyone willingly does his or her part to use social tools appropriately to protect knowledge for the future?
In our presentations, Phil Bradley, Bonnie Cheuk, and I naturally could only touch on the highlights of the questions raised by social tools. It was striking, though, how the sizable audience remained intently focused in a late-in-the-day session. I took it as a sign how the challenges associated with CM and KS in today's organizations occupy the hearts and minds of information professionals.