Tag: Collaboration

This ‘knowledge’ stuff

The term ‘knowledge sharing’ has been used more in the past few months than I have known during my tenure at my current organisation, however, if you asked people what exactly knowlege sharing is you will get many diffing answers. Here’s my stab at it. To me knowledge certainly has little to do with technology – it is mainly the IT stuff that puts knowledge sharing into practice.

In my world there are 4 steps:

Innovation (knowledge creation and impact throughout its whole lifecycle)

Knowledge sharing

Collaboration

Reuse

And itsrepresented in 3 spaces

Physical space

Social space (relationships, communities and social networks)

Virtual space and mind space

If someone is working on a database, they get knowledge from another place and apply it to the task at hand. They will gain knowledge from the application itself and could then share this knowledge and innovation with other people they know. However, 99% stop at this stage.

Our role, and I believe the role of the Knowledge stakeholders throughout the organisation is to take the shared knowledge and see how it can be used to collaborate and build meaningful relationships. The need to establish systems, processes and a culture that helps continually build on intellectual capital. Its less prescriptive than old knowledge management approaches. We shouldn’t just aim to get more documents published or get explicit knowledge generated and submitted to the repository; it???s broader than that. Users have to be impacted by this and we have to create networks and relationships that are extensive, intense and extend throughout the firm as well. Why do we need to so this? Because the old style intranet of document and missives died some time ago.

Taking the first step on Sharepoint

Sharepoint is coming. By the end of next year our intranet and collaboration tools should be migrated to Sharepoint. Over the last 12 months I’ve been doing lots of research on the good, bad and ugly of Sharepoint. Work by Martin White and IBF sessions have provided the most value.

For me, it emphasised how Sharepoint was not built as a CM system but an integrated Information Management system. All the presentations, and previous Sharepoint intranets I’ve seen, appear just to treat it as a CMS and little more. For us to get maximum value from the deployment we must think of how documents, collaboration and content can be integrated across the platforms, both behind and beyond the firewall. We need to start thinking about a strategy behind this so some deep musing time ahead.

Although Sharepoint may be a year away from getting behind the firewall we’ve taken the first steps to developing a strategy group/working party, not IT focused, but in terms of how we can use the information management applications (thinking of layered content, outlook, instant messaging, collaboration etc) so when its time for platform migration we have some joined up thinking and ideas on how to get best use, not by product, but by KS, Collaboration and document management. Anyone interested in following this year long journey can check out updates here.