A couple of weeks back Paul Gillin created a post over at his weblog (Paul Gillin’s blog - Social Media and the Open Enterprise) that I found an interesting read and worth while commenting but that up until now I didn’t get a chance to. The weblog post itself is titled The Future and you can find it over here. It basically comes to indicate the state of social media and it surely makes up for some good reading. He brings together a number of different key highlights based on his research that I thought would be worth while commenting on:

We’ve seen this all before: - Yes, that may well be the case but I feel that there is a key fundamental difference between a decade ago and nowadays. Back then only a few, those in the know of how to work their way through the Internet, were the ones taking advantage of being on the Internet. The rest was just a mass of lurkers and followers wishing they would join but not finding an easy way of doing it. However, today with the huge popularity of social software we have got the situation where everyone can share content out there on the Internet without having to worry about the technicalities of doing so, but just focusing on the content. That lowering the barrier and democratising the Internet is what I feel would differentiate a decade ago from nowadays.

ROI is a huge issue: - I agree, it has always been and will always be. And perhaps here in the social media space we are seeing the same thing that we have seen in Knowledge Management all along: it has never been easy to show ROI for KM so why would that be so easy for social media when it could be identified as a KM discipline on its own? Indeed, I feel that the ROI on social media is just a continuous battle pretty much the same thing as with KM, although it may be a bit more tangible. Why? Well, mainly because through that social media we are finding out how more and more knowledge workers are more willing to share what they know and collaborate with others. So the ROI from social media could potentially be easily identified by the huge amount of new knowledge and information that is getting spread around at the moment and, much more importantly, by the increasing amount of new relationships and connections that are being created through social media and which would result in smarter, much more effective and efficient knowledge workers who are able to share and collaborate with others in providing best value to the companies they work for. Again, ROI for social media and KM is not easy to prove, but a good solid base to continue working on that space is already there. We just need to grasp it.

RSS is the killer app: - Another highlight that I agree with wholeheartedly. Pretty much like I have mentioned elsewhere several times, its adoption may not be that fast at the moment, but how else are you going to be able to keep up with hundreds of resources in an information era where more and more interesting resources are emerging on a daily basis? I mean, before I discovered RSS / Atom feeds I used to monitor about 30 web sites (Work related or not) and nowadays my current RSS / Atom subscriptions go beyond 400 web resources. I guess that comparison is quite self explanatory about the impact that web syndication will continue to have as we move forward in this social media space of having access to hundreds of resources from a single point of entry and without having to waste time checking each of those resources individually.

Corporations are treading carefully for good reason: - Indeed, and that all depends on whether companies, and their management, are ready to let go that command and control attitude and start embracing social media as the new paradigm for knowledge sharing and collaboration along with whatever other traditional methods already available.

There is a shadow blogosphere that very few people know about: – That may well be the case but then again one thing that I have learned over time myself is that sooner or later they will find their space in the wider blogosphere and they would start creating and maintaining those wider relationships with the rest of folks out there. I mean, I remember the day when I was wondering why there were so few KM webloggers out there on the Internet and over time I have been finding both my place and other people’s places and I have grown now to a comfortable blogroll of over 60 fellow KM webloggers and the list keeps growing. It all depends on how much you look and, more importantly, how much you engage with other folks to take part of the different conversations taking place.

Bottom line: - I certainly agree with Paul’s comments when he states: “social media is going to be a huge disruptive force in the way we consume information. Its impact will not be welcome in all segments of business and society, but it will ultimately be a very good thing“. Social media will be here to stay, and for quite some time, and it would be down to us, the people, the knowledge workers, to make it work in the business environment, or not, just as well as it has been working out there on the Internet. It will be our choice. No doubt. But are we all ready? We better be.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Management, KM, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, ROI, RSS

A few days ago Bill Ives was actually asking folks to chime into his weblog post on More Tagging Articles and share some additional articles or whatever resources that people may have found interesting and worth while mentioning around the world of tagging and, specially, enterprise tagging for an upcoming article on “enterprise social bookmarking or tagging behind the firewall” that he is currently working on at the moment. As you may have been able to see already there have been a few folks who have already provided their input and share some really interesting and thought provoking visions of what tagging is and how it would be able to help the KM world. Thus I just thought I would chime in and share those resources regarding tagging / folksonomy and social bookmarking that I have enjoyed reading / writing or going through in the last few weeks. Let’s see how far we can go:

• Social Tagging For The Enterprise by Patrick Cormier where he provides a good overview of what tagging is in the enterprise environment with some examples already available.
• Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags? by Marieke Guy and Emma Tomkin. A lengthy article indeed on tagging but worth while reading if you would be interested in getting to know why tagging is so successful.
• Different references I have been weblogging about in both of my Internet weblogs. By clicking on those URLs you will be taken to a number of weblog posts that I have been sharing while commenting on other articles that other folks may have been discussing around the world of tagging.
• Tagging Beyond Content: Applications and People, where I get to detail how tagging could be a powerful enabler as an expertise locator within the enterprise.
• And from a tools perspective here you have got a couple of references on the subject:
  Dogear (the IBM internal Social Bookmarking offering which heavily relies on tags), Keotag (A tag based search engine along the lines of gada.be), my take on BlinkList and del.icio.us, perhaps two of the most popular Internet offerings for social bookmarking at the moment.
• Then other interesting resources to tap into for some further references would be the actual tags on social bookmarking or tagging in popular social bookmarking tools like BlinkList or del.icio.us.

I am sure there will be plenty of other resources out there around the world of social bookmarking and tagging for the enterprise and as I get exposed to them I will be adding them to the list (Perhaps even sharing some further comments on the subject) but for the time being those would keep you busy for a little while.

Now it is the time for me to get busy reading some of the great articles that other folks have shared in Bill’s weblog post and get to learn some more about this exciting and refreshing method for categorising things, and people, on the fly to then be able to find them at a later time which is what tagging is all about. Good stuff!

Technorati Tags: Tagging, Tag, Folksonomy, Knowledge Management, KM, Social Software, Social Networking, Enterprise Tagging, Social Bookmarking

Earlier on today, and through my RSS newsfeeds, I bumped into an interesting piece of news taken out from BusinessWeek and which was also referenced by one of the weblogs I follow: El Blog de Enrique Dans. Enrique provides a good commentary on it (Article, and weblog, in Spanish) but I just thought that same news article would be worth while reading for those of you here in elsua who are interested in social networking. The BusinessWeek article is titled Social Networking Goes Corporate and it comes to show how different social networking tools are starting to dive into the corporate world. Like the case of Visible Path, which has got quite an impressive demo.

The article itself is a worth while read as it actually provides with you a good overview of what is actually happening in the world of social networking. How in most cases things with pretty popular social networking sites have started with word of mouth (Perhaps the best publicity you can have) and how after a few months they have become what they are today: the hang out place on the web for quite a few people out there. Indeed, in the article you would see how several different social networking sites get named and how they have built up their critical mass and from there how there are a number of emerging businesses, like Visible Path, that are coming along thinking that they could bridge the thin line between social networks for personal use and for business use.

I am sure that over the next few months we will start seeing a proliferation of such initiatives trying to bring social networking tools into the corporate world and I am sure that at this point in time people would have some kind of reservations as to how effective that adoption will be. I am sure most of you have thought about that already. Well, the way I see it I suspect that the adoption will be a gradual process till at about a certain point in time where they will be a huge boom and corporate businesses will never be the same again.

Indeed, what will actually happen is that most of those potential social networking tools mentioned in the article have been always oriented towards a younger population, although there are exceptions, of course. And they all love it (If you care to judge how popular those different offerings are, like MySpace, or FaceBook). So as that younger population starts to grow the adoption would be gradual but as soon as that same population enters the marketplace and becomes the main workforce (Something that is starting to happen now) that is when the big boom will go live. Main reason being that those same younger generations would want to break the barriers of the connections they make and continue to make use of similar tools to what they have been exposed to all along, but in a corporate environment. So what was once a Social Networks offering for personal use could well become the main business tool for that generation. That is why we will be seeing a huge proliferation of initiatives like the one that Visible Path has just launched.

Nobody is going to deny the good value add from social networks. We are way beyond the tipping point in that particular sense, however, up until now lots of people thought that they were a nice-thing-to-have and that is going to change drastically into a must-have for every company. Time will tell, I am sure, but certainly articles like Social Networking Goes Corporate clearly indicates where we are now and where we are heading to. Social Networks are here to stay, for sure, but I believe that it would take a little bit of time before they become just as popular in the corporate world. That would be happening when that younger workforce outnumbers by far the older generations. Something that may have started but that over the next few months will become much more relevant when the baby boomers start retiring and their jobs are taken by younger generations. I know that some of this may already be happening, see The Maturing Workforce weblog for some more details on this, but I am actually wondering if corporations would be ready for such a huge drastic change in the way we get to share knowledge and collaborate through the usage of social networks and forgetting perhaps some of the traditional methods of collaboration we may have been using all along. I think so. I do hope so. More than anything else because I doubt they would have a choice at this point if they would want to survive and if not time will tell.

Technorati Tags: Social Networking, Social Networks, Knowledge Management, KM, Workforce

In the past I have been sharing a number of different pictures in my Flickr account, and also over here, about one of my favourite viewpoints from Gran Canaria: Pozo de las Nieves. You would be able to see how I have been sharing a number of those pictures from different areas from the same viewpoint, which happens to be the top of the island at nearly 2.000 meters high, but I also wanted to share with you a couple of pictures from what is to be the magnificent symbol of the Gran Canaria, Roque Nublo. So in this week’s series of pictures I have put together some of the best ones I took a week ago on a trip around those places but this time around with some stunning different views, including the above mentioned Roque Nublo, Roque Bentaiga (Another one of the many symbols from the island), mount Teide (The highest mountain in Spain and located in Tenerife) and one other rock that resembles a monk and which actually receives the same name: El Monje - The Monk.

Thus without any further delay, here you have got four of the pictures I have shared in Flickr so that you get a taste for the rest of the series I have put together. If you would want to see some more just click on the pictures as you would also be able to read some more on each of the pictures. Hope you enjoy them.

And, finally, like every weblog post for this category, here is another tip from Flickr that I have been enjoying myself for some time now. I have been using Picasa all along to manage all of the different pictures that I have taken so far (Perhaps one of these days I will talk about it as well after having tried quite a few options so far) and I have always been looking for a way of integrating both Picasa with Flickr and while surfing away I bumped into this particular weblog post: GMail, Picasa and Flickr by Jim Rutherford where it shows, in some very easy steps, how you can upload pictures directly from Picasa into Flickr using the e-mail (GMail) feature capabilities from both applications. Pretty neat if you would want to upload a whole bunch of pictures in one go and not sure how to get around it. Thanks a bunch, Jim, for sharing this great tip with us !

Technorati Tags: Gran Canaria, Pozo de las Nieves, Roque Nublo, Roque Bentaiga, Teide, Picasa, Flickr

It looks like quite a few of the regular weblogs that I follow have been talking about this very same subject. And all of them starting after the superb article that Job Udell creating on Modern Social Software Could Be the Key to Building Effective Enterprise Knowledge Systems: Reinventing the Intranet. So I just thought I would dive into the conversation(s) as well and share my two cents worth of comments. I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed Jon’s article itself, no doubt about it (I think he is on to something), but in particular I enjoyed a couple of paragraphs that were the ones that caught my attention all along:

"Shared bookmarking, coupled with tagging, is another piece of low-hanging fruit. Sprinkling Web 2.0 pixie dust won’t solve every problem, but the benefits of public services such as del.icio.us and Furl can be realized within the enterprise, too. That’s true because they benefit the individual first, and then, as a useful side effect, the community.

Given the opportunity, people will want to bookmark and tag the resources they publish internally. It’s the easiest way to create, manage, and share dynamic lists of such resources. This system pays for itself in improved personal productivity alone. Everything else is gravy, and there’s plenty of that.

Saved bookmarks chart the current and historical levels of interest in what their URLs represent, and they identify groups that share those interests. (Note that behind the firewall, bookmarks can refer to public resources as well as private ones inside the enterprise.) Tags identify sets of related resources and groups related to those sets. They also extend the metadata vocabularies that can be used to improve search"

Good stuff! I think it is the first time that I get to read elsewhere what I think are two of the most important and critical components from any given deployed KM system: the individual and the community. All along we have all been getting used to how businesses were focusing more on the business itself, including its tools, and how it was delivering the information and its knowledge without focusing on anything else, like a more active participation from its knowledge workers. And now it looks like that is about to change with the much more active participation and involvement from the individuals themselves and the communities they may belong to. It looks like thanks to this social software I have been talking about all along is going to provoke that change in the way information and knowledge gets spread around within a particular business. About time!

Up until now most folks out there would recognise how different Intranets were regulating their own content through the voices of a few while everyone else tried to digest some of it. In most cases this was generating a false sense of knowledge sharing and collaboration where only a few were benefiting from it. However, the majority of people were more keen on accumulating all sorts of knowledge snippets in their own computers because they just didn’t feel there was a need to share stuff with others. It was all coming to knowledge workers from the top all the way to the bottom in such a way that in most cases people would not need to leave their own silos.

Then all of a sudden social software, i.e. the so-called Web 2.0, comes along and there is this frenzy from most knowledge workers to start sharing knowledge on their Intranets using wikis, weblogs, social bookmarking tools, RSS / Atom feeds, podcasts, etc. you name it. All of it is there. And out of no blue you find yourself with a huge Intranet with multiple voices that is no longer controlled by just a few but by a complex network of communities that mix and mingle with each other enhancing the way information and knowledge gets spread around. And before you know it people start forgetting about keeping everything in their computers and they go crazy about sharing most of what they have using those tools. And that new wealth of information just keeps on getting bigger and bigger because for the first time plenty of businesses are benefiting from all this and start embracing social networking tools as the next best thing that could happen to them to both retain their knowledge workers and also to start building on a massive and complex KM system that tries to put everything together. And which, by the way, will succeed because those same knowledge workers are the ones keen on keeping it going. The same way they have been enjoying those tools out there on the Internet as their own Personal Knowledge Management systems to share their knowledge with others, they will continue to enjoy some of those same tools for their daily work on their companies’ Intranets.

And while I am writing all this I just couldn’t help thinking about the cultural shift that all this may be causing right now at this moment, where we go from a traditional business and its static KM system(s), where only a few get to run the show and the rest is just looking into it from an apathetic point of view without even getting too involved because of how complex it all seems, to a much more dynamic KM system(s) where knowledge workers feel that their voices are finally being heard while getting to share and collaborate therefore generating enough passion, trust, commitment and involvement to make it work. Exciting times indeed for company Intranets, but much more exciting and fascinating for knowledge workers and the communities they are a part of. And all of that thanks to this social software. Would would that thought about that, right?

Tags: Knowledge Management, KM, Intranets, Social Software, Web 2.0, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM

Melanie Turek has written a very interesting and revealing weblog post over at Collaboration Loop (Worth while subscribing to their Newsletter, by the way, in case you may not have done it already) titled In the Loop, which talks about the fact that sometimes it is not that easy to promote a KM culture within a particular business specially when the main key influential factor is not ready for that adoption: i.e. the people. Indeed, Melanie just lists what she feels are three primary barriers in the adoption of KM and collaboration tools:

• Integration: where she is encouraging the concept of a KM and Collaboration tools suite all integrated into a single focal point of entry, something that I have been advocating myself for some time now as well since it would be a lot less disruptive and distracting having everything you need to collaborate just a click or two away from your screen.
• E-mail: in here she is mentioning how most businesses do actually consider e-mail their main method for collaboration and knowledge sharing. Something that I agree with her is a misleading statement from the perspective where e-mail isn’t indeed a collaboration tool but more a communication tool. If not try to collaborate with several dozens of people on a particular subject through e-mail and see how long it would take you before you give up because of all of the messy interactions. E-mail is great for communicating for sure, but we all know that it does a lousy job in helping promote collaboration.
• Human nature: where she is indicating how some people are not ready just yet to let go their “Knowledge is power” - therefore I do not want to share what I know mentality in order to collaborate and she agrees that if true collaboration is supposed to be taking place this would be the main barrier that would need breaking. And I just couldn’t have agreed more with those comments.

As you go through the article further you actually get to read about a story from one executive who is indicating how despite all efforts put together to instigate a knowledge sharing and collaborative culture some of those folks just “didn’t get it“. That is a great story which in my opinion reflects the fact that knowledge sharing and collaboration doesn’t happen just like that. It needs to be nurtured, sponsored, promoted, facilitated, in short, provoked. In general people would have a tendency not to share what they know with others, unless there is one key fundamental success factor put into place: trust. So in the case of the executive story referenced in In the Loop it is a clear situation people people just didn’t trust the information and knowledge shared just like that but preferred to get to know the person who shared it. And it would be only then when people would be willing to start sharing and collaborating. When they have established that connection with others who they would be willing to share with. Not before.

Thus how do you inspire and provoke that cultural shift where people get to share and collaborate in a much natural and unforced way as what might be happening today in some businesses? In my opinion, one of the strongest key enablers to provoke that change would be through the creation and sustainability of communities. Indeed, they will be the main key primary drivers of that knowledge sharing and collaboration culture. Then, perhaps, through the building of a critical mass within the community (Specially at the early stages) they would be able to break those barriers and start trusting each other as being part of the group who share a common interest for a particular topic. There is no denying either that social software would help enable those communities to break their different barriers put in place and get them to trust each other more, which will then result in that cultural shift towards knowledge sharing and collaborating.

So much so, that in the end, if you see that you have got a group of knowledge workers who are reluctant to get together and share what they know, it may be a good time to look for that common denominator that could well be the spark for the creation of a community of practice which would help get things rolling and from there help facilitate a good environment where everyone would trust each other much more and therefore would be willing to share. It would be only then when that human nature barrier referenced above would disappear. And for good! So is your business making use of communities to break those barriers? Or are you still lacking behind thinking KM was never meant to be for you and your business? You decide.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Management, KM, Collaboration, Communities of Practice