Social media like blogs and wikis and online journals offer unique ways to capture, share and store an enterprise’s most valuable asset–the accumulated knowledge of its people, even those who have retired or moved on.  This is an opportunity too valuable to pass over lightly. 

The new technologies available for building an enterprise collaboration platform, or “Writable Intranet,”  are a giant improvement over existing knowledge management tools.  Indus Khaitan describes the potential like this:

“Writable Intranet” is the corporate intranet of the future where employees collaborate using Wikis, Blogs and applications interoperate using RSS. The Writable Intranet does not have series of static pages where information is disseminated “top down”. It is the place where employees collaborate, exchange thoughts, create plans, capture meeting notes, track projects, create documents (not word documents but documents which are web pages and have version control). The Writable Intranet marks the end of e-mail as the collaboration platform. The Writable Intranet means that enterprise knowledge is “free” and searchable by anybody. The “freedom” implies that knowledge is neither in e-mails and nor in documents but in easily accessible and searchable repositories. The Writable Intranet means information which is a constant source of data to other people who make modifications at will.

The value proposition for big organizations is strong but getting there will mean overcoming some formidable obstacles, both technological and cultural, not least of which is giving up some management’s ability to control the flow of information and data within the organization.   As Harvard professor Andrew McAffee observes:

These tools may well reduce management’s ability to exert unilateral control and to express some level of negativity. Whether a company’s leaders really want this to happen and will be able to resist the temptation to silence dissent is an open question. Leaders will have to play a delicate role if they want Enterprise 2.0 technologies to succeed.

What are some of the questions that organizational leaders are apt to be asking and any vendor who hopes to succeed will need to answer.  This is by no means a comprehensive list and I welcome your additions and thoughts.

Technological Barriers

1.  How can I be certain that the information that is gathered and shared behind the firewall stays behind the firewall?

2.  How do I control who has access to particular levels of  information and databases?

3.  How do I protect the integrity of the information from malicious tampering by disgrunted employees or managers?

4.  How can I be sure that information is being “tagged” properly for efficient retrieval later?  

5.  What kind of training do employees need before they can effectively use the technology?

Cultural Barriers

6.  How can I monitor the system to make certain that what individuals are saying and sharing reflects company policy?

7.  What are the legal dangers in saving and sharing so much loosely supervised input?

8.  How do I distinguish “productive” use of the technology from horsing around?

9.  How do I “manage” the gathering and disseminating of so much unstructured information?

10.  How do I know if I’m getting my money’s worth out of the investment in technology?

Obviously, there are many other questions that will be raised by enterprises considering the new social media technologies as a collaboration platform.  If you have some questions, or thoughts on mine, please leave a comment.