The possible business benefits of social networks

I have to admit I have been slow to find value in social networks and social media, particularly in a business context. Sure, I've tried Facebook, but I closed the account after I decided I simply did not care enough about the comings and goings, minute-by-minute activities and phone-enabled orgy of idiotic imagery (for example, the image here shows a foul baseball that landed just under the front passenger side of my car, hit by my 11 year old last night at the little league playoffs (they won, BTW) -- without my iPhone, this magical memory would be lost forever) of people I had not seen in person in years, and frankly have little in common with anymore.

Same for Twitter -- I have enough frequent, brief thoughts of my own to organize and evaluate I don't need them crowded out by the pithy musings of others, nor am I needy enough to really believe I am doing a disservice to humanity at large and hindering the advancement of intellectual discourse by not instantly sharing my every thought. That's what blogs are for, which are only slightly better in that they allow for the all-too-often unused capability to produce multiple drafts.

Now, LinkedIn I do use frequently, but less for interaction with others and more for research. And the more features they add, the less interesting it becomes to me as it just creates more visual noise.

Which leads me to the enterprise.  While many people are keen on the benefits of social media within business, I have been much less so.  Businesses exist to produce goods and services for less than the market will bear.  Social networks are distracting, and combined with other distracting technologies like email and phones, it seems to be more counter productive than not.

But here's the thing, whether I like it of not. Social media and networks can be fun and engaging. And if people engage, they contribute.

This has been the classic challenge in knowledge management. Just because you install software to enable a "Community of Practice" does not mean people will contribute. And those who do may not be the ones you really need, as the people who are really good at their jobs are generally busy doing their jobs, and have little time for anything else.

Another approach has been to hide rewards within a system to encourage users to explore it, but that tends to encourage the people who like to find things and get rewarded, and have the time on their hands to do so.  Which, again, are most likely not the people who excel at revenue producing activities.

Social media may be different.

Social media, if woven into the work flow and processes, could bridge the gap so that knowledge capture is thorough, useful and painless. But it will need to be guided and managed to truly be successful.

Determining the value of your content

A key challenge to connecting content is determining exactly what is useful and what is not.

The truth is this – the vast majority of information produced by the enterprise has little residual value to the enterprise.

The highest value content, or intellectual assets, are those that format, drive, guide or inspire the majority of information produced by employees. This "core asset set" may evolve and change over time, but it still sets the standards that define business value. The core set is the foundation for most content that is produced. Due to the critical nature of this set, and because it's generally small (relative to all content produced) the best way to manage these assets is manually as it must be continually refined and validated. However, once an inventory is complete, updating and evolving consumes little resources as it becomes self perpetuating if managed in the right kind of system.

The fresher the asset, the greater the value

New content produced from the core set is at its zenith in value the moment it is completed. Bottom line: the best work is always the most recent. As newer and newer content is produced, the value of the predecessor continually diminishes until it is reduced to archival status.

The real challenge at this stage is the location of the content, as the fresher it is, the closer it resides to the authoring mechanism. Thus, the very best content often lives in the least accessible places, the desktops and laptops of the creators. Making the freshest content widely and painlessly accessible is the real challenge, for both the system and the culture.

Archived content provides infrequent value

This is where search engines and content/KM management systems can be useful (though questionable in proportion to their cost), by automatically indexing and cataloging information stored throughout the infrastructure. Sure you'll have to sift through a lot of junk, but eventually you will find what you think you need. Odds are, however, if you didn't find it in the first two tiers, it's probably not all that valuable anyway – certainly not in proportion to the cost of the time wasted finding it.

How to start "managing knowledge"

When I attended a conference on knowledge management a while back, I was struck by the number of people trying to figure out how to best get started with KM in their organization. The real question was, are they still trying to figure it out after several decades, or was it a whole new generation who have been tasked with KM projects but not constrained by the intellectual baggage of past techniques – a generation far more willing to embrace technology than shun it?

It appeared to be the latter (at least I have convinced myself that is the case). So here's my best advice for them, along with a do-it-yourself "KM starter kit." But first, the advice: stop worrying about tacit knowledge. Pursuing tacit knowledge delivers few nuggets of usefulness amid mountains of useless information, and wastes much time and effort to do so. And, while things like questionnaires and communities of practice are “low cost” technologically, they most certainly have a financial impact on productivity (and consulting budgets).

So what is tangible and “knowable” in the enterprise? Drum roll please...that's right, business process.

While an organization is made up of people, it is the processes, the tasks, where people interact, hand-off and collaborate that define organizational purpose and value. People can be replaced, the processes cannot (unless the business model changes, of course).
With that in mind, here's how to build your KM starter kit:

1. Make a list of all the processes you can think of (feel free to ask others, consult process models, etc.). Then next to each one, prioritize it in a way meaningful to you by assigning a naming or numbering sequence (“high value, medium value, low value,” or “1,2,3”).
   
   
2. Next, make a list of all or some of your employees. Again, prioritize in a way that is meaningful, whether by retirement date, average employee tenure, RIF candidate, etc.
   
   
3. Connect the dots. Cross reference processes with employees, then use highest priority of both people and processes to determine where to start – which processes to document first, which employees to interview.

And there's more you could do – you could make a list of information resources, and prioritize and cross reference those, so you have even better insight into the most critical areas. You could do the same with controls — types of regulations and policies. And you could even cross reference software systems.

All these things together will give you a powerful road map for managing knowledge in a useful and meaningful way.

Now get going!

Process power to the people!

There are two kinds of business processes in the enterprise – consistently executable processes (deviation will not be tolerated!) and ad hoc processes, which guide, advise and recommend. The first are ideal for automation as they are tangible in their output, the second, not so much. The first have an entire class of tools and software to support them (BPM in its many forms), the second, very few. Ironically, this seems backward, as only 10-20% of the enterprise is automatable, while the majority consists of ad hoc, or “knowledge” processes.

Why aren't traditional process tools used for ad hoc processes? Process thinking is hard, it is not natural nor intuitive as it is a man-made thing created to describe man-made things (people brought together to produce goods and services for less than the market will bear) – thus the tools developed are hard to learn, hard to use and hard to understand by humans (but relatively easy to use as business rules for software code, thus the connection to automation).

For the benefits of business process to be realized throughout the enterprise, the tools to capture and communicate process must be easily utilized by anyone, anywhere, anytime with little or no training.
Is it possible for process tools to be created to do this? Sure it is, but it is hard. It takes time, experimentation and investment. And process tool vendors don't even consider it a requirement to do so as they have used the same metaphors for decades and assume rigorous training is a given, not an option.

While the Web freed the interface, web-based tools are only as good as the effort put into the design. And, while process tool vendors are bringing browser-based process tools to market, they have only done so now that the technology has made it easy for them to reproduce the same interfaces they have always used.

Of course, since these vendors now have browser-based tools, they seem to think this makes them inherently more useful and that they can now support and enable ad hoc processes.

But they simply don't get it.

While the Web provides a powerful means of distribution, it is not the medium that matters most – it is usability and usefulness. Only then will the power of business process truly be brought to all people.