Waterloo, Ont.-based enterprise content management vendor Open Text Corp. recently released a social media tool
for corporate workers to collaborate through threaded discussions,
communities, wikis, blogs, while integrating the platform with an ECM
backend for compliancy.
To me, the software appeared to do in the Web 2.0 world what
knowledge management was meant to do some years ago. In other words, be
a repository of corporate information that now has turned digital. One
company I worked for several years ago had a department dedicated to
knowledge management that created an online repository of corporate
documents, reports, whitepapers, all categorized according to content
type. It was static in that only the administrator could post content.
Users couldn’t add stuff nor leave comments or conduct a keywords
search.
When I spoke to Scott Welch, product manager with Open Text’s
collaboration solutions group, during a demo of the new social media
tool, I asked him how the concept of knowledge management as we knew it
several years ago fit into this product. Welch said it does have
aspects of knowledge management in that users can store and collate
content, but it’s so much more than that. It’s now more like leveraging
that knowledge to do things like identifying expertise and common
interests, and finding where a discussion on a particular topic might
have taken place at some point in time in the organization.
It was clear from the demo that what has changed is not just how
users are able to utilize that knowledge, but it’s the type of content
that comprises that knowledge. The Web 2.0 world means that knowledge
takes the form of things like threaded discussions within online
communities, user profiles, tracked comments in the margin of a
Microsoft Word document.
But while such a system is a great repository for knowledge in the
Web 2.0 world, the system is only as good as the content that goes into
it. I recall, in that previous company I worked for, we used a human
resource management system that employees frequently referred to as
“garbage in, garbage out” because input data was often not cleaned and
duplicated, resulting in reports whose accuracy was questionable.
Similarly, social media tools are only as good a source of knowledge
as what’s put into it. There are stories of enterprises deploying
social networking platforms like wikis and intranets where the actual
rate of employee usage turned out to be far below the expectation.
Employees often require an incentive to use new technologies, and maybe
the promise of better collaboration is not quite tangible enough. At
any rate, organizations have some work to do in adapting knowledge
management to the Web 2.0 world, starting with employee culture.
