Technology Behind Business examines trends and analyses key IT concepts. Each week an expert panel focuses on one type of technology or strategy, explaining its use without the jargon, outlining the pros and cons and providing tips for all types of businesses. The panel in this episode included Felicity McNish from Woods Bagot and Gerhard Voster from Deloitte.

You can watch the entire panel discussion on the Sky News Website.

It is actually challenging to define KM quickly in a way that is both understandable to people new to the topic but that will also satisfy those already familiar with the idea. There are of course those who like to grandstand and declare KM is dead or never existed in the first place, but personally I still think the KM concept has a role even in the era of social software.

But what does KM looks like today? There are a number themes in Social Business Design that resonate particularly for me, some of which I hinted at during the panel:

• The Connected Company – encouraging us to understand the nature of large, complex systems, and let go of some of our traditional notions of how companies function.
• The Shift to Systems of Engagement – the importance of focusing on non-transactional systems.
• Data-Driven Business Improvement – the role of ambient sharing, dynamic signals and various other types of indirect or weak ties between people in networks.

Related ideas are also reflected in the themes highlighted by the other panelists:

• Felicity McNish from Woods Bagot (who were recently recognised with a 2011 Asian Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise (MAKE) Award) talked about the importance of mobile access. This really points to the concept of addressing “place” in the people, places and things model of KM.
• Gerhard also mentioned Deloitte’s use of social media internally as part of its approach to KM. Similarly, both across Dachis Group and within the Headshift | Dachis Group team itself we have been long term users of social software for collaboration and KM. A great deal of our collective knowledge is readily available thanks to the flow of social tools, but we recognise it doesn’t entirely remove the need to deliberately create opportunities for learning, building social capital and knowledge sharing.

The key commonality here is that knowledge management isn’t (and never should have been) just about information or data management; but neither is it dominate to such related disciplines.

Incidentally, I wrote about the future prospect of mobile knowledge management back in 2005, for Image & Data Manager magazine. I said then:

“While the business use of such software may not be immediately clear, the growing interest in social networks, communities of practice and the use of narrative and storytelling techniques within organisations will generate demand for a new generation of KM tools that help employees to record events and facilitate serendipity using tools that are familiar and intuitive.”

Hmm. Sound familiar?

If you are interested in understand more about the intersection of knowledge management and social business design, take a look at some of our case studies – many of them include elements of knowledge management and social learning.

In fact, what both knowledge management and marketing have in common is that these are both disciplines that are fundamentally situated inside organisations. This makes knowledge management and marketing very much products of the organisations they live within. It doesn’t remove the need for domain knowledge about any of these topics, but experience and the literature tells us that the same management idea applied in one organisation can look completely different in another (and, more importantly, results can vary considerably).

I get that same feeling with Social Business Design.

Reflecting on the Headshift | Dachis Group’s Social Business Summits over the last month, I was reminded of a book by Roger L. Martin called, The Design of Business (see my review here). My key take away from that book was that successful design thinkers are those who deal equally with the issue of organisational change as they do with actually applying design thinking. The pioneers working in this space who presented at the Summits instinctively recognise that effectiveness, scalability and sustainability are just as important as creativity in social business design. These case study presenters were cautious to offer cookbooks for social media, because they know their approach is not immediately replicable and we have to allow for emergent, unforeseen and unmanageable (in a reliability sense) outcomes from engaging with customers online.

This is particularly the case where tools for engagement with customers online, including Facebook and Twitter (or their equivalents in places like China), are becoming increasingly commoditised and repeatable at a technology level. However, the people part of the equation is not. From simple technologies, we see complex social interactions appear.

From this point I noticed that people naturally found themselves shifting from looking at just how to market and sell to people online, to thinking about the impact on the value chain of their organisations. Thinking more broadly about this value chain at the Summits in Sydney and Singapore, we also touched on deeper issues like organisational resilience (how will that value chain respond when things go wrong or in response to a wider disaster?) and opportunities to rework that value chain, for example with tools such as Kaggle.

Talking at the level of Social Business Design at the Summits made sense because:

• It highlighted organisational pain points for people in the process of using social media and social networks; and
• It called out the potential to re-evaluate how we organise, to take advantage of the social Web.

This doesn’t change the fundamental elements of knowledge management (“help employees share what they know”) or marketing (“create great products or services, and get people to buy them”), but it does change how we design these parts to work together. And it is this that in turn that will change them.

This originally appeared on the Headshift blog.

Knowledge work is aimed at turning information into something decisionable and actionable; too often reports, presentations, survey results are mistaken for such.  While they are a key part of the decision equation, they are not enough.  They don’t provide insight.  The only thing they’re good for on their own is filling repositories.

Knowledge, unlike the data and information contained in reports, is a living & breathing thing.  It can’t be put in your enterprise content management system.  It exists in the heads of employees (often referred to as ‘tacit’ knowledge), constantly being shaped by different stimuli: articles, blog posts, pictures, models, books, conversations with colleagues, etc…  Communication is the process by which this constantly evolving knowledge is applied on data and information to a decisionable end.  This process will generate insights on how to take advantage of the information you have gathered.  Unless the reports, presentations and survey results are subjected to scrutiny and analysis through communication, no insights are created and decisions are delayed or malinformed.

Communication is more than just a block of time on your calendar.  It’s an opportunity to  share knowledge, gain insight, make better decisions and create for your company a competitive advantage.

What does communication look like where you work?  Is it enabling the application of knowledge to data and information?  Where do your company’s insights come from?

I believe social networks are not as much about “making humans smarter” as they are about connecting people to other people who can serve as resources to information.  Social networks are designed to support online connections to strong and weak ties.  Strong ties are people we interact with and often share similar interests (i.e., friends and family).  Weak ties refer to our connections to people where we have casual and infrequent interactions (i.e., friends of friends).  These are the people we do not know well, but trust enough to establish a connection for future reference.  According to research conducted by sociologist Mark Granovetter, the diversity of our weak ties offer resources that are often more beneficial to us than our strong ties.  As Andrew McAfee explains in a blog post, “weak ties might actually be the more important ones for innovation and knowledge sharing.”

Twitter is a great example of an open network of many weak ties.  This architecture enables information to spread at lightning speed across a global network.  For example, Twitter emerged as one of the primary sources of frequent information updates about the Haiti earthquake.  I find it interesting that Twitter is now branding itself as “a real-time information network powered by people” (versus the previous claim to be a mobile social messaging tool).

Social networks offer many benefits to the business world.  For example, a worker with a question that cannot be answered by immediate colleagues (strong ties) can socialize the question through the corporate social network (extending communication to weak ties) in an attempt to crowdsource an answer. Instead of spending hours searching for the answer, the worker can post his or her question publicly on the social network and move on to the next task while waiting to see if anyone else in the network has some insight.  Here, intelligence is derived not from having to know the answer, but in being connected to someone who knows the answer and shares that knowledge with you.

Knowledge sharing emerges as the most compelling driver for using social networks for business purposes, according to an IDC survey of more than 700 U.S. workers.  According to survey respondents, the top two reasons for using social media for business were:

1. To acquire knowledge and ask questions from a community
2. Sharing knowledge and contributing ideas to a community

The act of sharing knowledge through a social network also aids in the location of subject matter experts.  Org charts and titles are frequently outdated, making it difficult for workers to seek out colleagues for help.  Profile information stored in a social network is easier to update, and provides added context to information shared in the activity stream.  The openness of the activity stream of a social network allows all participating members to benefit from the information shared (one-to-many) versus communication sent through an email (one-to-one).  Hence, valuable tacit knowledge is recorded in the social networking platform and shared with the rest of the organization.  Ideally, this real-time information sharing across the network helps reduce redundancy and promote organizational efficiency.

Freeing the flow of information so more people can act on it is a major benefit of social business design.  Social technologies combined with corporate culture that supports information sharing behaviors enables a networked infrastructure.  The networked infrastructure helps organizations break down information silos to create a marketplace for information exchange.  Increasing the collective intelligence of your organization will drive efficiency and competitive advantage.  How networked is your organization?

http://softwarewiki.dachisgroup.com/

A big part of our work here at Dachis Group is to maintain an understanding of what sort of tools and platforms are available to our customers that can support their Social Business Design initiatives.

We provide a comprehensive set of technology research services including: software landscape mapping, feature analysis, security analysis, vendor analysis and tool selection.  We also develop alliances with vendors who we find we are recommending regularly, and finally, we are often engaged to manage the implementation of these tools directly.

Through all of this, we have assembled a list of tools that we believe are relevant to Social Business Design initiatives.

We thought it would be a good idea to share some high level results in the Dachis Group Social Software Resource Wiki to provide a resource for those exploring social technology tools and to ask for help in making it a better resource.

If you are considering deploying collaboration, community, listening, or other social tools inside your organization, we have several hundred companies and products listed.  We’d appreciate your help in curating this list by providing more details and submitting additional cases.

For more resources: Stay on top of the most current thinking on Social Business Design and subscribe to our Collaboratory feed.  To learn more about Social Business Design, download our Social Business Design white paper free of charge.

Find out how Dachis Group can help your business worldwide send email to moc.puorgsihcad@seiriuqni, or download our fact sheet and contact us.

For me, the key issue is whether or not you believe software alone is sufficient to engineer fundamental business change. In some cases, perhaps it can; but in general, simply grafting new tools and systems onto existing business culture and practices is unlikely to result in the change we are looking to achieve.

Traditionally, this has been addressed through the idea of adoption of tools – a secondary process of persuasion, education and engagement that is required to get people using new software. But tool use in itself is not a meaningful outcome. What many Enterprise 2.0 practitioners mean when they talk about adoption is the adoption of new ways of working, but there is not a direct and inevitable link between this and tool use if the underlying context of business process does not change. I spoke about this at greater length earlier this year in Boston.

If we look back, one of the drivers for Enterprise 2.0 was the Cambrian explosion of innovation and new tools in the consumer world of Web 2.0, which inspired people to take the lessons of blogs, social networks, social bookmarking, RSS and other tools inside the enterprise to rejuvenate the stagnant rock pools of corporate IT. This process is ongoing and necessary. But it is not enough.

Some of the most important features of the social web and its new tools are not manifested in the software per se, but in the affordances and network effects they can create, and in some of the lessons they have taught us about incentives, behaviour, feedback, information networking, ambient awareness and so on. These have implications not just for which tools we use, but for how we see the structure of organisations and networks, and how we organise work.

Many business processes are the result of an accretion of lots of small rules, workflows or responses to prior problems or risks that the business has faced in the past. Taken as a whole, the focus on management by repeatable process has gradually made organisations less and less agile, and more and more expensive to run. This is why we continue to see new competitors emerge without the baggage of legacy process in various sectors that should be dominated by well-established incumbents. We have all seen examples inside companies where groups of intelligent people collectively do something they all agree is dumb, but that is what the process (and sometimes culture) demands. This is not just a feature of the commercial sector either. Governments and public sector bodies have been run for many years as if they cannot trust their employees to do the right thing, and rigidly following a process regardless of the outcome is completely acceptable, or as the old joke has it: the operation was a success but the patient died.

Society as a whole seems to be moving away from this process-driven culture in many areas of our lives, and in computing we have long since moved away from an obsession with automation and artificial intelligence towards a recognition that augmenting human intelligence and capabilities is a more sensible use of processing power, and more effective. Even proponents of Knowledge Management (KM) have moved away from the obsession with software solutions, systematisation and explicit knowledge capture, returning to the basic principles that lie behind this field of enquiry before it became a software vendor-fest. Dave Snowden’s latest mini-definition of KM, for example, is really all about helping people make better decisions:

The purpose of knowledge management is to provide support for improved decision making and innovation throughout the organization. This is achieved through the effective management of human intuition and experience augmented by the provision of information, processes and technology together with training and mentoring programmes.

So if social business design goes beyond the implementation of social software to make organisational design more socially calibrated, with all the potential for greater efficiency, agility and value creation that implies, then where do we begin?

Firstly, I think the four archetypes of social business design provide useful lenses through which to view a business or department, and we are already using them in our consulting to help identify where to begin. These are not just theoretical constructs, but rather ways of thinking about some of the key features of social computing, as already practised, and social business design:

• Ecosystem: assessing the health of your networks, identifying structural holes and other issues that prevent people finding and connecting with each other to get things done. Typically involves social networks analysis and measurement, but also standard workflow and task-fulfilment analysis.
• Hivemind: looking at how well these networks are harnessing informal knowledge sharing and collective intelligence, and whether or not customers and partners are involved in this process of creating meaning. Examples of tools in this area include social bookmarking, Digg-type ratings and even collaborative wiki spaces.
• Dynamic Signals: looking at how to make hidden data visible and make sharing a by-product of action to create ambient awareness of what others in the business are doing. Internal twitter-type tools are useful here for real-time signals, as well as good old RSS feeds and others. These types of dynamic feedback are key to evolutionary improvement and innovation, as we have seen in the social web.
• Metafilter: helping people cope with information overload and turn signals into actionable insights, and improving findability using social networks. Simple examples might include social search, personal dashboards or alerting systems. We think this area will increase in importance as more and more social tools achieve adoption.

Second, we need to look at how to apply these ideas from different business perspectives, such as internal collaboration, external customer engagement and the wider value chain, involving partners and the market as a whole.

Third, on a practical level, I think any intervention needs to achieve the right blend of strategic goals, tactical use cases and straightforward problem solving using social tools. Too much strategic consulting in large organisations today fails to embrace the people it will impact, making them part of the solution, and it leaves implementation to others lower down the food chain. Covering the whole stack from strategy to implementation makes more sense and is more accountable. Although software is not the only answer, there is no doubt that the existing backward state of internal IT – in particular the factory model of one-size-fits-all provision that we have talked about for years – is a major block on progress. Therefore, there are real and immediate benefits to be achieved by giving people and groups smarter, simpler social tools that they can use to get their job done, and this can light little fires of emergent behaviour that are so important in stimulating change and showing what can be done. Top-down and bottom-up are not mutually exclusive. We need to work at both ends simultaneously and create more feedback loops between them.

This implies that we need to focus on creating longitudinal programmes for social business design inside organisations, which raises the question of who owns and manages such a programme given it is likely to cut across internal communication, know how, business development, marketing and IT, but does not comfortably sit within any one of these areas. Given the huge potential for efficiencies and time/cost savings that social business brings into play, these programmes will pay for themselves over time in many cases, but in addition to investment, the most important success factor in my view will be to avoid being dragged down into becoming simply an IT project, under IT governance, or a conventional change programme.

Running a programme of activities and projects, with clear feedback, monitoring and evaluation criteria, will also help create some objective measures of success. Until now, running stand-alone pilot projects has sometimes been a hit-and-miss way of influencing change, partly because of the scale issues that Michael Idinopulos has written about and partly because however successful some pilots become, if they are politically vulnerable or seen as marginal, then they can be canned anyway.

It will be a fascinating journey from social tools to social business design, and whilst we have lots of ideas based on six years work bringing simpler, smarter social tools into organisations of all kinds, we are of course still at the early stages of what feels like a major sea change in the relationship between people, technology and organisations. We don’t have all the answers, and we are always open to learning from the experience or insights of others, so we welcome your feedback.