Tapping Into Social-Media Smarts
Employees share information in their personal lives. Companies can use those skills to improve workplace collaboration.
By TERRI L. GRIFFITH
To recognize the huge potential social networking offers for companies looking to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration among their employees, consider these two facts:
• About half of company knowledge-management initiatives stagnate or fail.
• There are about 131 million U.S. Facebook users between the ages of 18 and 64, and more than 500 million world-wide.
That's more than half a billion people using the same kinds of tools so many companies have struggled to put to productive use. In their private lives, users of Facebook, Twitter and other social media are completely at ease forming communities of shared interests and keeping everyone up-to-date with messages, pictures and documents. Now they are ready to put those same tools to work at the office—to help everyone see who knows what, who needs what information, and how to coordinate their work.
In other words, employees already have the skills for more collaboration. It's up to companies to take advantage of them. Here's how to do just that:
Have employees identify areas that would benefit from greater collaboration.
Be explicit. Raise the subject with a question like, "If we had something like Facebook [or Wikipedia, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.], what part of your work would be better?"
It's likely that many of your employees are already thinking about how they might apply these same tools to improve how they get their jobs done. In fact, they may already have started without you.
In some companies, teams have created Facebook groups around their projects to help them get to know their teammates and have a single place to store project documents. Other savvy teams have studied Facebook, and then asked their IT staff to create a similar online space for collaborative work.
In both cases, employees are taking action based on recognizing unmet needs for online collaboration and knowledge-management tools.
Don't say no to social networking because of concerns about public sites.
Continue: http://on.wsj.com/s9Z4BP
-WSJ
Join Professor Griffith for The Plugged-In Manager to continue the conversation.
The Plugged-In Manager
December 15, 2011
5:30 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.
Hult International Business School
1355 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA 94111
Advance Program Check-In
PROBLEM SOLVING MAY BE MORE THAN JUST KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
For the purpose of this article I will contend that the goal of knowledge management is to solve problems.
The problems faced by society today are becoming much more complex than they used to be. Where once they could be solved quite easily as many individual problems, due to advances in communications and greater connectivity, these many problems have now become so intertwined that they must be solved as large, more complex problems. That’s not easy.
Unable to solve these problems, people resort to using oversimplifications and fallacious reasoning, which results in problems not being solved, frustrations, anger, and hostilities. This, for example, has left us with a gridlocked Congress unable to do anything more than argue and threaten to shut down government by not passing the frequent continuing resolutions necessary to keep government operating. So we have government by threat and accusations rather than government by negotiations.
We need to find a way to solve these complex problems to avoid disaster. Fortunately, there exists a way. Unfortunately it has not gotten the attention it deserves because people are still convinced it cannot be done. Sometimes when the future has arrived, it takes several decades to recognize its presence. But our current problems are so serious that we may not afford the time to recognize that now these problems can be solved.
Solving problems requires more than just information. It also requires working with the relations between various aspects of information and the ability to use logic with these relations in order to understand their implications and solve problems.
The Explainer is a running beta version of a program that helps people with different perspectives collaborate to collect and discuss the cause-and-effect relations that define the situation from which a behavior may arise. We use some license by calling these relations ‘knowledge’.
People are fairly good at collecting these cause-and-effect dots. For example, ‘Joblessness’ is caused by ‘Businesses unable to hire employees’, which is caused by ‘Businesses unable to sell their products’ OR ‘Businesses unable to acquire funding to maintain and extend their businesses’. And ‘Businesses unable to sell their products’ is caused by ‘Joblessness’. The Explainer program makes it fairly easy to directly enter these relations without the need for the intervention of a knowledge engineer to translate them into a form the computer can recognize.
Then given a behavior, the Explainer does the abductive logic to find what explanations would produce that behavior. But since each explanation may predict other behaviors as well as the one intended, the Explainer uses deduction to find these other behaviors so that they can be tested as to whether they occur. If an explanation predicts a behavior that does not occur, it is ruled-out.
See http://problematics.com/articles/ARTICLE-B.pdf.
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