EMBEDDING WIKIS, TAGGING AND RSS ON YOUR INTRANET

Knowledge Management Review, Mar/Apr 2007 by Manchester, Alex

Understanding the potential of social tools in business

Social computing - a collection of software tools that allows for a more informal and conversational online environment - has emerged on the web, and it has the potential make intranets indispensable to the organization. Here we present an overview of three of these technologies, compiled from the Melcrum reports Transform your intranet, Top 10 new technologies for internal communicators and A communications toolkit for managers, focusing on how they can be implemented on an intranet.

In the last few years there's been a spate of tools developed for the web that build on the idea of the yellow pages. Users upload information about themselves and their interests and form associations with other users. These tools have been successful to various degrees, but at their most simple they make it easy to surface and create informal communities and connections.

A social networking tool can be used to add color and context to interactions between employees. When employees converse for the first time they can find out about each other - their history, their interests. This information that makes conversations richer.

You can use social networking tools to search for someone with specific skills, either by searching the whole system or using expertise topics. Employees often go outside the organization to speak to an expert only to find out there was an expert in the next office.

Implications for the intranet

Considering the lengths some organizations have gone to in an effort to connect employees who have knowledge with those who need it, social networking's infiltration of intranets is inevitable. It's a short step from some of the features that have already been introduced to intranets and the power of social networks.

Here's how it might work. Tom sets up a social network using a site available on the intranet where he works. To the network he adds the other employees he knows, those with whom he has worked and colleagues in his own department. During the course of working on a project, Tom discovers that he needs some bit of knowledge that he can't uncover using ordinary methods. He crafts a query and sends it to his network using a form on the site.

If one member of his network knows the answer, he can respond through the network, where the answer is archived so it can be retrieved the next time somebody asks the same question. If nobody in the network knows the answer, though, they can forward it to their networks, and so on.

Whenever an employee has the answer - no matter how many degrees from Tom that employee resides - he can enter the answer for forwarding to Tom and, simultaneously, have the information stored in the system.

Implementing wikis

Wikis are collaboratively written online documents. They make it easy for groups to write, edit, link or delete pages in a way that enables collaborative working as never before. The word isn't an acronym, as many people assume, but in fact comes from the Hawaiian phrase "wild wild," which means "quickly." A number of features are common to most wild tools:

* It's very easy to write and publish content.

* The history of each page's changes are tracked and can be seen by all users.

* Differences between versions are represented graphically and it's easy to revert to previous versions of each page.

The power of wild technology is most clearly seen at Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), where users have created and sustained nearly millions of pages (that's just in English - Wikipedia also has versions in more than a hundred languages) and created an encyclopedia to rival the Encyclopedia Britannica in depth and accuracy.

Wikis can be used for a number of business activities including:

* Creating websites: Establishing a website used to be a relatively complex business, involving hiring expensive designers and developers to build a static site that was difficult to update. Wikis allow you to publish online content immediately, and maintaining wikis is trivially easy.

* Research: Asking users to populate a blank wild page on a given subject quickly distributes hidden knowledge.

* Creating documents collaboratively: Writing collaborative documents is often frustrating because of the confusion about which versions are up to date. With a wild, this changes. There's no clear ownership from the start - anyone can read and change at any time. Changes are tracked and easily visible, and version control is in the hands of all users. It's usually possible with wild software to be alerted to any changes made to the document by a number of methods and there's generally a much more five and collaborative feel to the writing than is possible using the traditional document metaphor.

* Managing projects: Project plans are easily created and shared and, through comments threads on the wild page itself, users can discuss, debate and agree changes and developments. Timefines are easy to create and share and the very open nature of wild communication means that it's easy to keep teams up to date, informed and engaged in projects as they happen.