EMBEDDING WIKIS, TAGGING AND RSS ON YOUR INTRANET

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

Implications of wikis for the intranet

While tools such as blogs and wikis have found their way onto only a handful of intranets, their eventual assimilation into intranets is inevitable.

The question is whether to wait until these tools have become standard intranet components or begin taking advantage of the benefits they can bring to their organizations today.

Embracing social software on intranets will probably mean having to convince management of their value. To do so means explaining how these tools contribute to solving the problems that keep your senior executives awake at night.

Your CEO, president and other officers aren't tossing and turning because the company has not yet introduced blogs into to the intranet.

They lose sleep over shrinking market share, reduced sales, competitive activity, whether the strategic plan is still on track and whether the company has the ability to recruit and retain the talent necessary to execute the strategic plan.

Can blogs and wikis address these issues? By themselves, no. But they can add to the company's strength, primarily by putting the power to share knowledge and information into the hands of employees themselves.

These tools all engage employees, put them in touch with one another, reward knowledge sharing, foster collaboration and encourage innovation.

None of the companies that have introduced these technologies have done so for the "coolness" factor. They saw how the tools could make them more competitive and, ultimately, more profitable.

It will be up to the practitioners who choose to introduce these tools to ensure that they serve the organization. You'll need to perform an impressive balancing act to keep social software focused on the business while fostering the kind of natural human voice that emerges from blogs, podcasts and other social software tools.

Search is easier with tagging and folksonomies

RSS, or "really simple syndication," as mentioned previously, is the mechanism by which weblogs, wikis or forums publish their content in a way that readers can then subscribe to it. This allows readers to select sites they value, subscribe to their content and be alerted in applications called aggregators when that content has changed.

They can then read the content from these diverse sources in their aggregator, removing the need to visit lots of sources and keep track of what's changed since the last time they were visited.

RSS is fundamental to building a knowledge sharing environment using these tools and brings about possibly the biggest shift in behavior. Web content becomes streams and patterns of new and relevant stories rather than static, unrelated content. Users who get expert at finding "the good stuff" can share their RSS subscriptions with others and help them piggyback on their experience and valuable sources of news and information.

Tagging and what's important to you

Tagging is the process of adding metadata to documents, photos, music and so on to make them easier to find in the future. Flickr (www.flickr.com), was one of the web based tools that first made the benefits of tagging apparent. Flickr allows users to upload photos to the web and in doing so tag them with words that describe their content. With thousands of photos being uploaded and tagged every day Flickr takes these tags and makes the patterns in their usage visible in powerful ways.