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The challenge I have been running into is convincing CTOs, CIOs and CKOs that there are network effects. These people have invested heavily in pre-Web 2.0 "knowledge management" solutions. They view blogs and wikis as a threat to the possible success of their existing investments. They fail to realize that adding a wider range of productivity tools to the Intranet will add value to existing tools, rather than take away from them.Do you have any suggestions on how to communicate this.

A short answer to your question is that in such cases an appeal to corporate competitiveness might make the most sense. Enterprise Web 2.0 (or to use the emerging enterprise 2.0 tag) evangelists such as Andrew McAfee and Dion Hinchcliffe are always on the lookout for corporate success stories to publicize. I'd pay close attention to what they have to say. Often in public presentations they are challenged by corporate audiences to "prove that this stuff works." They always like to point to public examples -- when they can -- in order to rise above the hype. Being able to point out that a comparable or competitive company "is doing X already - why aren't we?" can be a powerful motivator.

As a cost-conscious consultant I would first want to know whether the existing knowledge management system can be augmented with newer collaboration, social networking, and relationship management features in order to extend the investments in infrastructure that have already been made.

Work organizations increasingly adopt shared electronic databases. However, employees' unwillingness to contribute to shared resources undermines the utility of such technologies. Current research is limited to either a utilitarian or normative perspective. To advance understanding in this area, this study proposes a three-dimensional framework. It includes the utilitarian and normative perspectives as two complementary dimensions in addition to a third collaborative dimension. Based on this framework, the study identifies three key organizational processes and advances an additive model to predict employees' willingness to contribute to shared electronic databases. An empirical test was conducted to assess the model in a large manufacturing organization. The test showed both significant overall effects of the model and significant main effects of each predictor variable. The article will discuss the findings and address both theoretical and practical implications. Key Words: information sharing • collective action • organizational knowledge • knowledge management • collaboration • communities of practice • identification

Portland, Oregon will be host of GOSCON 2006. Portland is Oregon's largest city, and was recently selected as the most livable city in the United States by Forbes magazine and North America's "Best Big City" according to Money magazine.

Corporate Wikis reviewed: Confluence, JotSpot, WetPaint, Socialtext by Troy Angrignon on Mon 10 Jul 2006 06:30 AM PDT  |  Permanent Link  |  Cosmos Wikis are on the rise in corporations. And it's about time. One of the principles of Web 2.0 is that your user community can generate content that is better, faster, and probably easier to read than you can as a vendor. One way to enable them to contribute would be to build a wiki and let them flesh it out. Some good examples are coming up in this article: "Corporate wikis breaking out all over: MSDN Wiki" by Dion Hinchcliffe. (He has another great post as well called "Exploiting the Power of Enterprise Wikis") Quote of the day: "Not leveraging the contributions of a company's most impassioned and enthusiastic customers is starting to be seen as a significand oversight in many business circles." It appears in the article that eBay is using Wikis to better communicate between their users, partners, and suppliers. Now MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) is using their pages to improve the quality of their developer documentation with the MSDN Wiki. THAT is a great usage. Your users often know your product better than your engineers and product managers because they have to live with it day to day. And guess what? If they tell the truth about some part of your product being broken - that's a GOOD thing.

Atlassian's Confluence is the best of them so far. Pros: the overall design is clean, it has advanced management tools, good security, and simple attachments.Its email function has to pick mail up from a POP box which makes it a little bit less ad-hoc but still functional. And most importantly, it also has great tools for moving pages around. Cons: Text editing, like with most apps these days is a bit dodgy, and pasting in blocks of text from Word is likely to cause problems. The pricing model is reasonable but for some reason (possibly because they're from Australia), they still don't have a directly hosted option so you have to use somebody like Contegix or deploy it on your own box. This seems to be a big and obvious oversight on their part these days. Also, their pricing model doesn't encourage small deployments right off the bat. I think this is the one that we'll use more of internally at the company where I work. Summary: The best of the enterprise wikis today, and one of the best options for scalability.

WetPaint is a newcomer that is doing some interesting stuff and that might be a better bet than JotSpot. Pros: The design is beautiful, the tool is very easy to use, the text editor is one of the best I have seen. Cons: I'm not clear on their entierprise suitability and it's not really their target market. It didn't appear that they had much in the way of administration tools, granular security, or any way to integrate into a back-end authentication system. Summary: I met one of the WetPaint guys at Gnomedex but he didn't seem to know the product very well. Hopefully next time, they'll put somebody more knowledgeable at their booth who knows the product in more detail. I think they're worth watching to see what they do in the next few months.

Taking social bookmarking behind the firewall opens up new uses, including the following: Providing topical resource lists that can be personalized and shared—creating personal "knowledge management" systems through lists of winning sales proposals, best practice deliverables, etc., around specific topics or work efforts; Extending individual profiles to let others know what content an individual considers important; Facilitating discovery of employees with similar interests or facing similar issues; Offering support to online workgroup activity; Measuring popularity of intranet documents through numbers of tags; and Supplementing enterprise search engines through the emergence of new keywords that are meaningful to employees.

There are two ways to go about encouraging adoption of social software: fostering grassroots behaviours which develop organically from the bottom-up; or via top-down instruction. In general, the former is more desirable, as it will become self-sustaining over time - people become convinced of the tools' usefulness, demonstrate that to colleagues, and help develop usage in an ad hoc, social way in line with their actual needs.

These key users should: be open to trying new software be influential amongst their peers, thus able to help promulgate usage have the support of their managers Users who are potential evangelists should be identified at every level of management, not just amongst the higher echelons, or amongst the workforce.

3. Convert key users into evangelists Training in the form of short informal sessions (face-to-face or online) and ongoing on-demand support are the basics for encouraging adoption. Too much training or too formal a setting will put users off, and is usually unnecessary.

Knowledge management problems in a large organization

Big problem in an organization like ours is getting access and distributing information that exists in one part to other parts. It is amazing how hard it is to first of all find out who is responsible for certain topics. Of course we have lists, who does what, but finding them is not always easy. Some departments publish them on the corporate intranet and with the new Google Search Appliance, we can actually find them. But finding out what their projects entail, the intended output, project plans, drafts, introductions into the subject, is quite simply impossible.

Work in projects is done through mail.