Social Media and Knowledge Management

I’ve been thinking about social media in terms of knowledge management as of late (a common theme when discussing Web 2.0 in a business/organizational setting). In a seemingly only tangentially note, I awoke yesterday morning and this was one of the first Tweets that I saw from @RichardDennison:

“Social media is people telling their stories” – Steve Crescenzo (@crescenzo)

My response was “I like that characterization of social media. I would also say that social media is about adding context”. Seeing Richard’s quote helped me think in a different way about what knowledge management looks like leveraging Web 2.0 technologies.

I think what distinguishes Web 2.0 technologies from traditional hosted knowledge management repositories is that Web 2.0 platforms over a greater window into process. In other words, Web 2.0 offers context, while KM repositories generally only store finished products.

Knowledge Management as a Byproduct

The advantage of working in a web 2.0 environment is that knowledge management comes at no additional cost. However, “working in a web 2.0 environment” is a difficult concept: in an ideal case, this actually requires transferring processes out of closed channels like email, Word, PowerPoint, etc (i.e. comfort applications) into the web environment. If you build your knowledge in the wiki, you can trace a product from the earliest stages to “finished” product.

Conversely, traditional repositories depend on users taking the additional step of submitting finished products for approval and inclusion in an officially vetted database. These products will exist with perhaps only a paragraph of context and a line of contact information (though probably the information of someone 2-3 working levels above the individual who actually produced the product).

An Example: Wikipedia and Knowledge Management

As a bit of a concrete example–that may require only a bit of imagination–we can take a look at the Luc Bourdon article on Wikipedia. Imagine that this article is a finished product sitting in a KM database: it’s a Word document probably accompanied by the opening paragraph as context/summary.

Now, let’s take a look at what we learn because this product is NOT actually in a KM database. You get the same content: that same finished product that can be read in a hurry if you don’t care (or don’t have time to care) about the process. However, there’s just so much more available. For example, I can see how this article started. I can also see it on landmark dates, like the day that Bourdon tragically died. And I can see what’s changed in the month of March. On top of all this, I can also see what was addressed during the Wikipedia Featured Article process by taking a look at the discussion page.

The takeaway

Asking a guy who’s a year away from retirement to sit in front of a computer entering his knowledge into a wiki is not an optimal solution (though apparently does work sometimes). Building products in a wiki is a fantastic way to capture institutional knowledge and a great amount of context around it. Web 2.0 tools–not just wikis of course–are a fantastic tool that allows knowledge capture, public thinking, and tracking the evolution of ideas over time when the work is done in public.