Making Collaboration Tools Pro-Knowledge Sharing

By Michael Sampson
in

If you embrace the use of a collaborative workspace platform in your organization—think Microsoft SharePoint team sites, IBM Quickr, 37signals Basecamp, Central Desktop, etc.—are you improving or degrading the ability of your employees to share their knowledge? Specifically when the sharing of knowledge includes activities like reading what people in other teams have written; using data that was gathered in one project for the purpose of analyzing trends in another project; and collating all recent proposals to streamline the writing of an impending one.

At the local level, for the specific group of people who are given access to a specific workspace for the purpose of carrying out the work of their project, the use of collaborative workspace tools improves the ability of the team to share knowledge. All of the activities that happen in the project are naturally captured as an immediate by-product of doing the day-to-day work through the tool; it’s not something separate that people have to update. Doing the work and having the artifacts captured in a context-rich location, offers full referential awareness of what everything is related to.

At the divisional and organizational levels, however, by default knowledge becomes fragmented across many access-controlled workspaces. Specific items that might contain helpful knowledge are hidden from wider purview. This is because only people who have access to the workspace can view and use the artifacts in the workspace. Thanks to innovations like security-trimmed search results, if you’re not in the group you have no awareness of even the existence of certain workspaces and the knowledge they contain.

Hide and Seek

How does an organization do things differently so these default implications don’t apply? And related to that, what do we mean by “knowledge sharing” anyway?

With respect to doing things differently, I see three options. The first option is greater openness and accessibility across the board to the contents of workspace sites. This means, first of all, a greater cultural embrace of an open access strategy. Access permissions to workspaces are set at higher levels (rather than small groups of 10–15 people), so everyone within a division can see all of the divisional projects currently underway. Or at the extreme, all employees in the organization can see everything. Limited access privileges give way to near-total or total openness.

The second option is to view the use of access-controlled collaborative workspaces as a time-bounded stage in the overall enterprise content lifecycle. Collaborative workspace tools are of great benefit during the content creation stage, and while in this stage, access privileges are restricted to those who are in the core group. This means that the core group has a separate place where they can do their work together without constantly having to explain or defend the in-progress state of their work. But once the creation work is completed—the group has come to closure on the matter at hand and has made a decision or written a final recommendation—the material in the workspace becomes more widely available. The final reports and the key discussion documents are moved from the collaborative workspace into the corporate document management system or published to the Intranet. This means that everyone in the firm can see the finished work and take advantage of the polished knowledge contained therein, in whatever way makes most sense.

A third option is to leave all of the artifacts in the collaborative workspace, and use a search tool that while honoring the specific access privileges of the workspace, will analyze it for key contributions that could be helpful. It would then broker a connection between the knowledge-seeker and potential knowledge-providers, hiding from the knowledge-seeker who specifically could help them (to protect the knowledgeable from unwanted interruptions) until the target person agrees to help with the query. In other words, there would be a second type of search result mixed with the standard type, showing the searcher that other knowledge is available and making the offer to inquire if the knowledge-owner is willing to share it.

Knowledge Sharing

Having outlined the three options to make collaboration tools pro-knowledge sharing, let’s consider the second main issue, that being the concept of knowledge sharing itself. What is the nature of the knowledge that has the highest utility to the rest of the organization? One possible answer is the finished documents or recommendations that arise from the work of the group. Everyone in the organization is able to access everything through search or browsing. A second possible answer is a connection to the people with obvious knowledge and expertise in a given area. By implication of their association with a document or recommendation, or a collection of articles about a topic, other people can infer that they are a source of knowledge about an area of interest to them. My sense is that the greatest value collaboration tools offer to enhancing knowledge sharing is in regards to this second option. While knowledge in a document may be perfectly up-to-date at the point of it being authored, that knowledge is going to degrade over time as environmental factors change. It is not going to be the most up-to-date knowledge available because the people who authored it will have learnt more and perhaps even reversed their position over time. By revealing who has made a contribution to knowledge in a particular area, the system opens opportunities for collaboration.

In the final analysis, all of these are concerns for your governance policy on collaborative tools and their relationship to other enterprise systems, including your records management system. What’s your take? How you are dealing with these knowledge-sharing issues at your organization? Contact me at msampson [at] messagingnews [dot] com

For Your Reference

Messaging News writer Michael Sampson helps organizations improve the capability of teams that can’t be together, to work together. He writes at www.michaelsampson.net

Published October 1, 2008