Knowledge Management Essay

WEEK 3
Would the use of social media aid or hinder knowledge creation?
Social media is often cast as being at odds with enterprise initiatives such as knowledge management. There is a sense that as people embraces and uses social media tools like Twitter, Yammer, and LinkedIn. The enterprise loses control over their knowledge. While this is certainly true, it is also nothing new. There have always been and always will be opportunities and reasons to search the Internet vs searching the Intranet; for participating in an Internet discussion group vs. one in your enterprise community; and for leveraging external wisdom vs. known internal resources.

In fact, the most successful knowledge management systems embrace social media, but with a business mindset. The smart KM implementations leverage blogs, subscriptions, communities, discussion forums, and member profiles. They tie it together with search in a single working environment. In addition, they look for opportunities to tie in other tools to streamline knowledge sharing — everything from instant messages (i.e. Sametime) to micro-blogging (i.e. Yammer).

Most organizations today struggle to effectively manage their rapidly growing volume of vital corporate knowledge which is being trapped in information silos like email inbox’s. They have a limited understanding of organizational expertise (talent), the right information is not collected or not available to the right people at the right time to make the right decisions or knowledge is lost when employees leave the company, etc.

On the other hand, organizations are increasingly depending on knowledge & information technology as assets to innovate and create value. Several major trends have been identified and analyzed regarding the transformation of knowledge management into social business

Increased adoption of social technologies, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
Increased adoption of mobile platforms & other tablet devices.
The rise of Gen-Y in organizations that were born digital. Basically they know what social collaboration is and they are bringing the concept to life in their workplaces.
Many organizations are moving their business systems to the cloud to reduce costs which also helps in the adoption of social media & mobile gadgets.

Knowledge management is what company management tells me I need to know, based on what they think is important.
Social media is how my peers show me what they think is important, based on their experience and in a way that I can judge for myself.

Employees who frequently interact transfer knowledge more effectively, supporting the opinion that community networking is an important

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