Last week I interviewed “Boris” (not his real name) about his and his company’s handling of the pending retirement of senior IT staff who are critical to the maintenance and operation of a number of his company’s business-critical mainframe legacy systems.
I was initially interested in learning whether Boris thought that modern social networking and collaboration tools might be useful in documenting and transferring the specialised expertise staff needed for maintaining critical systems. Instead, the discussion took a different direction and revealed some underlying issues that go beyond technology enabled knowledge sharing.
All in Collaboration
Paul Carney provided this insightful comment on my earlier post titled What if Communities Don’t Share Their Expertise?:
Keeping people connected in order to share expertise is a great idea, but the problem is that those people who have a large amount of knowledge tend to grow very large networks.
In the first article in this series I commented on the web based evolution of systems for matching up experts (and their expertise) with users based on relationship management and social software technologies.
In this article I discuss the implementation of such systems within large organizations
If I write something that is likely to be changed by the distribution system or by the actions of collaborating authors, what do I own? What if, when I write a blog article I come back and regularly change, update, and correct the original, and add comments? Do I have a way of knowing if people who read the original will know that I've made corrections or changes? These are difficuly questions, and one way to help answer them is to develop registration systems to help identify and describe works and their owners (or creators).
Part of the evolving Web 2.0 environment is the collection and redistribution of original content and conversations as well as meta-information (tags etc.) relating to that content. What we are seeing are not only the easy creation of online content and media but also the sharing of that content and associated information and conversations. Functions such as aggregation of feeds and mash-up of application services are examples of operations that take place where original content and functionality may be combined and recombined in new, unique, and potentially powerful ways. We need to make sure, though, that in the process we don't destroy the integrity of the intellectual property we now find it so easy to copy and manipulate.
Collaborative Deconstruction of DRM
There's a terrific series of articles and comments over at Freedom to Tinker that involves the authors' pre-publication of a detailed analysis of DRM technology. Some of the stuff is pretty technical, but if you take the time, you'll be impressed with the analysis and with the many intelligent comments that are being left (I left one, for example!)
Jeremiah Owyang and I recently co-authored a “white paper” titled “Business and I.T. Must Work Together to Manage New ‘Web 2.0’ Tools.” For joint authoring we used the “Writeboard” web based collaborative authoring system. This article describes our experience.
I’ve used Salesmetric (www.salesmetric.com), a hosted, web based sales lead tracking system, for a couple of years. (The provider calls it a “sales force automation” tool.) In this report I describe my experiences using it and some of the things that I have learned.
Overall I’m very pleased with the system. I have learned a lot about this type of tool and what that might say about using other hosted, web based tools with groups of users spread around the country.