Info 202 Fall 2011

Few months back when I was leaving my job at an IT Services
Provider company to join I-School, I thought of looking up the knowledge documents I
contributed to the company knowledge database over an extended period of time.
A quick search yielded nothing, pretty embarrassing, given the fact that I knew
exactly what I was searching for - the exact document title, all related tags
and metadata. An hour of digging inside the knowledge management system gave me
the answer - a curious organizing principle in action - so to say. Even though
all the documents I authored were related to same technology platform, they
were being indexed under the corresponding knowledge net of the industry
vertical service line for which I was working at the time of contribution. For
example, some documents were there under Manufacturing vertical knowledge base,
some under Energy & Utilities knowledge base and so on. To be listed under
the knowledge base for my specific horizontal technology platform, I should
have submitted it to that database also besides the vertical service line for
which I was working for from time to time, since the system was lacking cross-indexing
capability. This article, Social intranets: Enterprises grapple with internal
change discussing the transformation of enterprise intranets from traditional
inflexible systems to a "fundamentally social intranet" made me
recall this interesting tidbit from my experience.

The author strongly argues for deep integration of social
media model into the enterprise intranet fabric instead of settling down with
some cosmetic additions of social tools like blogs and wikis into the legacy
intranet systems. The key employee activities - communication and collaboration
when facilitated in a participative social context can result in quality information
production and better sharing of knowledge. The social media model when applied
to enterprise context closely follows the idea of 'Organizing Systems'. Each
interaction an employee makes in the social software platform is an observable
and identifiable resource trail, which can be a blog entry, profile update, a
tag, a comment or a link. The multitude of social tools available facilitate
collaborative conversations among employees while the information content of
such interactions is socially organized and retained in the system for reuse.
According to the author, a carefully designed social intranet guarantees a
deeply interlinked information ecosystem, which can account for an improved
enterprise-wide search capability. User interactions made possible by the
social platform simultaneously acts as process of resource creation and
resource organization. The potential of such an organizing model benefits both
employees and the organization. Intranet being a social platform by default
will enable employees with an open collaboration tool at their disposal and the
organizations can benefit from the user generated activity and associated
knowledge creation.