Why Social Computing Aids Knowledge Management
Social networking tools promise to help companies harness the knowledge inside the heads of their employees and put it to work for the business.
Social networking tools have been used mostly by consumers but are now emerging in corporate environments. A 2007 survey by IDC (a sister company to CIO's publisher) found that almost 40 percent of very large companies—those with more than 10,000 employees—were using business or social networking tools, more than 30 percent were using online communities and just under 20 percent were using social bookmarking tools. Smaller companies were less aggressive in using the tools but were also adopting them.
Social networks are so easy and intuitive to use that practically anyone can jump in and get started. Just ask Cisco CIO Rebecca Jacoby. "My 80-year-old mother is on Facebook," she says.
This ease of use epitomizes social networking's potential for companies that want to tap the knowledge of their workers. It also highlights a challenge for CIOs: the perception that IT isn't moving fast enough to adopt these applications within the business.
Cisco is already moving down this path. It is developing a companywide social computing platform aimed at greasing the idea process and capturing institutional knowledge by strengthening existing networks and making it easier to adopt new ones. There's Directory 3.0, its internal Facebook, with employee listings designed to identify an employee's area of expertise to enable collaboration. It has Ciscopedia, an internal document site, and C-Vision, its version of YouTube. And it has the Idea Zone, a wiki for people to post and discuss potential business ideas.
Despite these initiatives, Jacoby says IT is still perceived by business users as not moving fast enough to leverage social networks because they already use them personally. "People ask me all the time, 'Can't I just go to an ASP and create a community?'" She says they cite both the speed and the low cost of doing so.?But Jacoby says that CIOs need to consider issues of privacy, data security and the ability to scale across a global organization. It's no good, she says, if 15 different business units develop 15 different online communities "that can't talk to each other."
Still, Jacoby says social networking has led IT to change how it works with Cisco's business units to develop social computing tools and set usage rules."That's a real cultural change for IT organizations, and that's way more challenging long-term than the technology," says Jacoby.
-M.F.
What's driving interest in the market? Social networking tools show clear potential for improving collaboration and sharing different types of knowledge within organizations. And employees typically are familiar with them. In fact, 25 percent of companies say that workers are already using social networking tools for work, though only 10 percent actually offer such tools, according to CIO's 2008 "Consumer Technology Survey." But of those who do offer the tools, 30 percent do it to improve KM.
