How to benefit across successful knowledge silo's?
James Robertson from the Australian Step Two Designs recently released a number of excellent small content management briefings. I learned about them today, a result of being on their mailing list.
One of the papers has a challenging title Collaboration tools are anti knowledge sharing?.
Basically the paper outlines the issue of having a large or growing number of knowledge tools, like e.g. Lotus Notes or more common these days SharePoint (the latter my own input) that for the team/community that is using the tool are quite helpful, but that are virtually worthless in terms of cross community sharing of information. James argues that the issue arises because of the lack of context of the material stored in the silo’s, from the perspective of outsiders.
I quote:
“What is this file, is it a final or a draft? How does it relate to this other document? Where is the main project plan?”
Having visited a few SharePoint sites recently at my workplace, I can agree with the context point to some extend, although good descriptions to documents surely help. I guess insiders will also benefit from that? Actually, I find it a bigger problem that it is often hard to find your way around in spaces that are freely designed by the respective administrators. Thus not so much context as navigation. This last issue can be solved somewhat “company-wide” by using standards for designs I guess.
What puzzled me a bit about the issue of context, was that James stated that enterprise search will not be a solution for the problem.
“By definition, most of these collaboration spaces are only relevant to the people using them. Including them [content in the silo’s: MdR] will therefore reduce the quality and relevance of search results for staff as a whole.”
If search is not the answer, what can actually be done to solve the problem and optimise knowledge sharing across silo’s, for the stuff that is relevant to outsiders?
A bit of a brain dump to start off with:
- Enable tagging of content (so authors do the tagging)
- Distributing more via RSS (subscribing and doing keyword search in the RSS feeds)
- Having the enterprise search system using keyword based alerts?
- Social book marking (so tagging from the user side)?
Anyone?
Related: my other Sharepoint articles
Technorati tags: Sharepoint, SharePoint 2007, Microsoft, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Office 2007, KM, Knowledge Management
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posted Nov 6, 10:52 PM on Nov 06, 2007 |
category: Sharepoint
/ Enterprise 2.0