Why Social Computing Aids Knowledge Management

About 150 of the 250 IT staff members have signed up and are using the wiki, blogs and other tools built into it. Jojo says it's too soon to say what impact it's had on the organization. But in a year or so, "I would hope to be telling you that this is a tool that we as an IT organization can't live without and it becomes an essential part of how we support the greater Flowserve organization," says Jojo.

While Flowserve built its own application, IDC's Levitt says companies have plenty of social computing tools to use, many designed to work with their current software. Vendors including IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, Novell and Oracle are adding these tools to their products. The trend began several years ago, but only now are companies starting to become comfortable with the idea.

"The average worker two years ago had never been in [an electronic workspace]," Levitt says. Now, thanks to instant messaging and social networking sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, most businesspeople are familiar with online communities.

But while users may feel comfortable, businesses remain uneasy. Levitt notes that tools like Facebook lack the security and privacy that corporations demand. He thinks products like Lotus Connections, which combine a number of social networking tools into familiar software and make them easier to adopt, will become more common.

A Perfect Solution?

Social computing would seem to solve some of the challenges posed by KM. But these tools come with their own set of issues for the CIO.

Workers can set up their own social networks outside the company's IT infrastructure, creating privacy and data security issues. Companies will be less able to control communications enabled through social computing, both internally and externally. And there will still be a learning curve for workers used to communicating in specific ways.

Wainhouse Research analyst David Dines says user issues will be the hardest challenge for CIOs in companies that are adopting social networking tools. "What CIOs need to ask themselves is, How are people actually using the wiki?" he says. "What kind of employee structures and policies do we have in place to encourage the proper use of these tools?"

Still, analysts are optimistic about the marriage of social computing and KM. Dines says that in 2007, enterprise sales of tools like Liveworld, SocialText and Mzinga, which offer ways to build customer and internal communities, and wikis, respectively, reached $200 million. IDC, meanwhile, projects that social networking will be a $1.3 billion market by 2012.

What seems clear is that social networking tools are poised to help businesses cut through the maelstrom of information and improve how workers share knowledge. Dines says these tools will streamline how workers research projects, form teams and share knowledge. His prediction: "Pretty soon you'll see people say LinkedIn and Facebook are interesting, but look at what we've got internally."