Can social networking technologies help?
I've been looking at social networking during my free time this month, to see if organisation can truely benefit from it somehow. Mainly looking at LinkedIn, and FaceBook (was on Multiply before social networking buzz is here, but it is too slow to be productive, and didn't innovate much since it started) as I'm in both network. Both have distinct characteristics. LinkedIn is more serious, linking people you have worked with or have a relationship with, and gaining your credibility through recommendation. FaceBook is also linking people you have worked with or have a relationship with, but very interactive, and content you are creating, via status updates, or through the fun little apps you add, propagate through your network. Those fun apps is double edged. On one hand, you get to interact with people further away from your network, which would take lots of time to maintain through your typical communication tools, those fun apps could also take time away from being productivity.
But looking at the organisation without KM initiatives, social networks might give organisation some form or knowledge retention, if it can be implemented properly. (Note: I'm not very familiar with knowledge management technologies).
Imagine (and I really mean imagine) your organisation organised into vertical markets, with each business units having their own accounts manager, pre-sales consultant, and delivery team. These supposedly have strong domain knowledge, but probably weak in technology knowledge. So there is a central team that looks purely on technology. When there is a sales engagement, BU account manager and pre-sales consultant will probably get one of the relevant consultant in the central team to be involved. But the domain information they can share is probably only whatever sales engagement they previously was involved in (more towards the technical side). Sure, some of these information is probably captured in CRM systems. But what about information generated during delivery process (Difficult customers, infrastructure issues faced, etc)?
I'm just imagining, say some sort of facebook is in place in the enterprise, with tagging in place. Will social networking help capture these information into an organisation's KM structure to be consumed in future sales engagement? Imaging a project managers doing some blogging about issues faced in managing the project, like some generic clause that potentially opens up the scope of the project, or an application guy facing identity management between two system. All these information, I'm quite sure will be useful to the pre-sales team / architect that may be involved in future engagement when designing a solution to best serve customer needs!
If an enterprise get it, I believe one of the key factor for social networking to be successful is it need to be pervasive as well, easily accessible through office productivity tool, and even better, support offline mode (even in 3g, staying connected all the time in Singapore is still a challenge). One of the main reason why my blogging slows down is I can't blog without coming to this web page. I don't even have time to see if I can link Word or OneNote to this community server...
Oh, how I wish I'm in an organisation who would readily dogfood some of these technologies...