New Media Mania

The last thing an organisation ignorant to its inherent knowledge resources needs is a knowledge manager uninterested in its people and processes.

His/her proposed “solution” will be no better than a stab in the dark—potentially painful.

Knowledge management practitioner Lucas McDonnell cautions that the knowledge management profession is becoming dangerously techno centric and techno trendy, and less focused on people.

“Tackling fundamental information flow problems in an organisation is tough work and often it’s easier to throw a wiki together than try to map out real problems,” he blogs.

“We, as knowledge management folks, love to build cathedrals—and hate to build sorely-needed sewers.”

To the point, indeed.

Simply rolling out a corporate social intranet, which might include blogs, wikis, and other social media technologies, will not ensure its success.

As Charman-Anderson writes: “The opportunities that social tools present to business are frequently missed because no one thought hard enough about how to introduce them to people.”

“We have to treat tool adoption as a meme, and rely on people propagating it through the company, person to person,” she suggests.

“In this sense, we are doing what marketeers are doing: Trying to create a self-sustaining trend. We want the social tool to go viral.”

Charman-Anderson describes two ways to encourage adoption of social media: “fostering grassroots behaviours which develop organically from the bottom-up; or via top-down instruction”.

The former is more desirable, she writes, as it will become self-sustaining over time: “People become convinced of the tools’ usefulness, demonstrate that to colleagues, and help develop usage in an ad hoc, social way in line with their actual needs.”

In this way, adoption becomes a viral trend.

The widely-held belief that trends are propagated via a small number of highly influential people is being challenged by research into network effects by Yahoo’s Duncan Watts, who neatly summarises his research findings, thus, in a published interview with Clive Thompson:

“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one—and if it isn’t, then almost no one can.”

Watts likens network effects to wildfires—if the conditions are ripe for a blaze, any little spark or glowing ember will do.

Thus, when introducing new technology to an organisation, Charman-Anderson focuses on “low hanging fruit”—staff that are keen to work differently, or those performing tasks that are perfect for a social platform.

Arthur Clemens of internet design agency Lost Boys wrote: “Building a collective memory only works when it supports the employees: they must do [sic] the effort, out of their own motivation.”

Lost Boys successfully introduced wiki technology as an intranet platform for its staff of 200 people by giving them ownership and control over content and structure (rather than let the communications department dictate that) and ensuring that the platform’s “killer applications”, such as a telephone number quick search facility, are front and centre and accessible.

A few weeks into the implementation, Clemens found that people were more open-minded than he had expected—although an internet design company likely has a larger proportion of technophiles on the staff than, say, a trade association.

Even so, Clemens said that it was difficult to break people’s work habits: “They still send primary information through e-mail and hide files on the fileserver. So a further change in mentality is needed.”

And indeed departmental and line managers continue to play an important role in validating and rewarding social knowledge sharing, to entrench it into the organisational culture.

Knowledge-centric drivers of organisational strategy are “mainly influenced by socio-cultural factors, say Alstete et al, wherein management can play a predominant [nurturing] role … to create a win-win socio-cultural milieu in which workers are encouraged to share their knowledge in a synergistic fashion”.

Some sources:

Alstete, Jeffrey W.; Halpern, David; “Aligning Knowledge Management Drivers With Business Strategy Implications”; ‘Journal of Knowledge Management Practice’, Vol. 9, No. 3, September 2008

Charman-Anderson, Suw; “An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in Enterprise”; http://strange.corante.com/2006/03/05/an-adoption-strategy-for-social-software-in-enterprise

Charman-Anderson, Suw; “Confessing a Dirty Little Secret”; http://strange.corante.com/2008/04/10/confessing-a-dirty-little-secret

Clemens, Arthur, “Twiki Success Story of Lost Boys”, http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Main/TwikiSuccessStoryOfLostBoys

McDonnell, Lucas; “Is Knowledge Management Dying a Slow Death?”; http://lucasmcdonnell.com/is-knowledge-management-dying-a-slow-death/

Thompson, Clive; “Is the Tipping Point Toast?”; http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html