On a social collaboration platform, knowledge does not sit still...

On a social collaboration platform, Knowledge never sits still....

What do I mean?

If your company has a vibrant social collaboration platform which is embedded in the day-to-day business process, I expect your employees would be adoption the following new behaviour:

- instead of going to the intranet homepage to check out what is new, employees receive real time updates on their acitivity steams.

- instead of waiting for the newsletter curated by the communication or knowledge manager to summarise all the useful resources, employees are following people, content relevant to them, and getting the updates before they receive the newsletter

- instead of waiting for the next knowledge sharing meeting to connect with other community members, employees can connect with one another online before the event. 

- Instead of only getting to knowing colleagues via face-to-face meeting or working on same project/team, employees can get to know, exchange ideas and learn from colleagues belonging to a completely business different network

- instead of relying on knowledge managers to organize and categorise approved content which goes into a knowledge base, employees can organize what they need according to their own preference, employees can create their own set of dynamic feeds and alerts to useful resources. 

- When employees need something, they can do a search, or ask a question on the community, and go direct and interact with the experts (but not via the intermediaries).

In this environment, KNOWLEDGE DOES NOT SIT STILL. It constantly gets updated, viewed by employees who want to know, get challenged and changed by the conversation, comments, insights exchanged between the author and the employees. It gets created more rapidly. It becomes obsolete quickly too (if it no longer serves the purpose). Policies, pitch decks, product brochures are updated faster with continuous user feedback.

So what is the role of knowledge manager in this networked workplace? 

If knowledge does not sit still, knowledge capturing and organizing can be costly and time consuming but its value can be very short lived. We have to be selective to pick the strategic content that we must invest time/effort to manage, and let go of the rest.

I would argue we need to seriously focus on managing the "flow" of knowledge rather than managing information/knowledge as content objects. We need to pay attention in designing the time-space moment when "knowledging" happens, ie help employees discover what they need just-in-time, create an environment where they can make sense of the knowledge they encounter (including listening, reflecting and commenting with context), and enabling them to create new knowledge and disrupt outdated ones at a unprecedented speed. (Note: if you like to dig deeper into "knowledging" see this paper I co-author with my mentor Dr Brenda Dervin)

We need to continue to acquire new skills and embrace new mindset to operate and add value in the networked enterprise. 

Fellow knowledge managers, what are your latest innovation to facilitate knowledge flow? Please share....