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Q9-7 What Is the Role of Knowledge Management Systems?

be easier, for example, for a General Motors employee to find a General Motors document using
Google than using an in-house search engine.
This is content management on the cheap. Just put documents on a public server and
let Google or Bing do the rest! However, documents that reside behind a corporate firewall
are not publicly accessible and will not be reachable by Google or other search engines.
Organizations must index their own proprietary documents and provide their own search
capability for them.

How Do Hyper-Social Organizations Manage Knowledge?

In recent years, social media has changed the orientation of knowledge management. In the past,
the focus was on structured systems such as expert systems and content management systems.
These KM techniques relied on planned and prestructured content management and delivery
methods. Social media fosters emergence. In the KM context, employees and others express their
knowledge in a variety of modes and media, and the mechanisms for managing and delivering
that knowledge emerge from usage.
Hyper-social knowledge management is the application of social media and related
applications for the management and delivery of organizational knowledge resources.
Progressive organizations encourage their employees to Tweet, post on Facebook or other social
media sites, write blogs, and post videos on YouTube and any of the other sites. Of course, as
discussed in Chapter 8, such organizations need to develop and publish an employee social media
policy as well.
Hyper-organization theory provides a framework for understanding this new direction in
KM. In this frame, the focus moves from the knowledge and content per se to the fostering of
authentic relationships among the creators and the users of that knowledge.
Blogs provide an obvious example. An employee in customer support who writes a daily
blog on current, common customer problems is expressing authentic opinions on the com-
pany’s products, positive and possibly negative. If perceived as authentic, customers will
comment upon blog entries and, in the process, teach others how they solved those problems
themselves.
The open airing of product use issues may make traditional marketing personnel uncom-
fortable, but this KM technique does insert the company in the middle of customer conversa-
tions about possible product problems, and, while it does lose control, the organization is at least
a party to those conversations. As stated in Chapter 8, hyper-social organizations move from
controlled processes to messy ones.

Hyper-Social KM Alternative Media

Figure 9-27 lists common hyper-social KM alternative media, whether each medium is used for
public, private, or either, and the best group type. Except for rich directories, you know what each
of these is already, and we need not discuss them further.
A rich directory is an employee directory that includes not only the standard name, email,
phone, and address but also organizational structure and expertise. With a rich directory, it is pos-
sible to determine where in the organization someone works, who is the first common manager
between two people, and what past projects and expertise an individual has. For international
organizations, such directories also include languages spoken. Microsoft’s product Active Directory
is the most popular rich directory.
Rich directories are particularly useful in large organizations where people with particular
expertise are unknown. For example, who at 3M knows which 3M product is the best to use to
glue teak wood to fiberglass? Probably dozens, but who are they and who is the closest to a factory
in Brazil? If no one is near Brazil, is there anyone who speaks Portuguese?