All in knowledge management
A couple of articles have me thinking and wondering why we still convert "collaboration" or "social business" into things they are not. The problem - as always - is that people are confusing the tools for the behavior. The behavior we want to see is people working together to get things done ("collaboration").
"The greatest crisis facing us is ... a crisis in the *organization* and *accessibility* of human knowledge." Robert Heinlein
James Slavet has an interesting set of "Five New Management Metrics You Need To Know" on the Forbes technology blog. Rather than look specifically at throughput, he suggests some internal metrics that might be leading indicators.
The 2011 MAKE awards for North America, Europe, Asia and the Global winners have been announced recently.
Review of Eric Von Hippel's "Democratizing Innovation" which looks at the spread of user-inspired and user-created innovations throughout all industries. What creates it? What sustains it?
Rather than asking how we do things, we need to learn from how we think about things. That is the way to translate "best practices" from one place to another.
Just because someone doesn't actively participate (talk) in their community, this doesn't mean that the person and the community don't benefit.
I received a number great responses from my last post on KM for small businesses: more than just email. The most important comment I will repeat: whatever you do has to fit with the style of the business. There is no such thing as one-size-fits all knowledge management. Therefore there is no one-size-fits-all technology. And for small businesses, the technology is most likely a smaller element anyway. Much more of what's considered to be knowledge management happens in the conversations and interactions amongst the members of the business.
If you really want this "social media thing" to be a way of working, then each person needs to pick up the tools and figure out how the tools make sense for THEM. Sure, you can do training, and introductions, and have the early adopters show others how they use the software. In the end, though, people have to choose to switch because it makes sense for them.