"Benioff explained on Monday's call that Salesforce reps took the social enterprise mantra to customers, but "couldn't find the buyers," suggesting even Salesforce.com didn't exactly understand what it meant." After all the hype during the launch of the "Social Enterprise" in 2011, it was time for a new mantra "The Internet of customers". And as we hop from one jargon to another, customers are left pondering on what exactly they wanted when they bought what they did! (http://www.zdnet.com/salesforce-ceo-admits-social-enterprise-pitch-didnt-work-7000023336/)
Recent articles point to the growing disenchantment with social media tools as a powerful way of capturing knowledge. While they still may be a good medium to stay connected within the enterprise, there is growing realization that they do not exactly contribute to enterprise knowledge
(http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-decision-maker/how-yammer-is-killing-enterprise-social-networking/). One of the reasons for this has been the absence of a definitive context – one of the key strands in the DNA of a Knowledge Management System. While most social collaboration tools advertise themselves as KM tools, the ability to transform chatter to tacit knowledge (one that gets embedded in the DNA of the enterprise) is still some distance away. It is just not sufficient to say that it has been captured in the knowledge repository of the organization, and therefore the knowledge now exists in an explicit form.
Why is this so? Knowledge is an active process of knowing, the processes and results of participation in organizational practices. At one end of the spectrum we have technical knowledge – knowledge relating to skills and expertise required to perform tasks. At the other end of the spectrum, is the knowledge required for strategy and innovation – the translation of experience and expertise into actions that promote sustainable competitive advantage and growth. While to a large extent the knowledge required to perform tasks can be codified, stored and retrieved, the other kind of knowledge is mostly tacit. The success of any knowledge initiative will depend on how well this tacit knowledge is elicited and used. Such knowledge in action results in new products and processes which are then institutionalized and become new explicit knowledge.
So, if we were to consider an oft-quoted statement "Knowledge walks out when your employee leaves the organization"… it is true only to the extent of social collective practices that the organization engages in. So, the real question that the organization needs to deal with is on how to create the context in which social engagement takes place. Social media cannot do this…it is only a facilitator for recording the process. Social tools can enable this process effectively if they are grounded in the context where participation results in exploiting the weak ties and enabling greater collaboration, outside the circle of influence. For example, induction programs in many organizations is merely a set of PowerPoint presentations and canned lectures that purportedly gives the new hires a bird's eye view of the organization. However, engaging the new hires in conversations that relate to real-world problems exposes them to the organization in a manner that no induction program can achieve; more importantly, the organization gets to benefit from the experience of the new hires from day one. How can a social collaboration tool enable this? This, I believe is the challenge that social media tools need to surmount.
Conversations need to connect people to people, people to content, or content to content, for it to be actionable. When this happens the tacit nature of knowledge lends itself to transformation – to becoming assimilated by others in the enterprise, and thereon to getting embedded in the organization's way of working. This sharing of experience that occurs results in higher forms of learning – those that can impact more than just transaction-level activities; resulting in the manner in which an organization innovates and strategizes.
Collaboration goes beyond just working together on a project; in today's world, where technology has made the world smaller, it means a whole lot more. Social learning, Communities of Practice, and the good old chatter we see on social media all contribute to some form of collaboration. In fact, social media has almost become synonymous with social collaboration in the enterprise. Yet, how much of this actually adds up to enterprise knowledge is anybody's guess.
What has been your experience with the use of social media tools in your organization?
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