caito

These days “Social Networking” is, to put it mildly, en vogue. Everybody wants to somehow do something with social networking. Of course, I am also member of OpenBC as well as LinkedIn. But still, I was always missing the more crucial usage of social networks, i.e. the usage for Knowledge Management. Here comes a company promising to solve that problem - finally.

Here’s an example of how the site works: Let’s say a salesperson at company A wants to contact the chief information officer at company B. The suitor could make a cold call, but that’s not a very good way to get through the front door. Visible Path would let the salesperson seek a colleague or business associate who has a connection to the CIO. He or she may find multiple “paths,” in fact. (Social Networking Goes Corporate - BusinessWeek Online)

I think, this one is really something to watch for. Even though I doubt that “Visible Path” will be successful, I am thinking along the lines of what they are planning. In my Master Thesis, one of the biggest obstacles for Knowledge Management described was the fact that people do not want to share their ‘knowledge’ with a “public body” such as a central Knowledge Management Unit in a company.

When I designed a “solution” for this, it was merely a theoretical suggestion on how to solve the problem, it had no real-world solution (actually, this is not true: It was a real-world solution, but not a technological one. I designed lots of methods, processes and activities, since I didn’t believe in a technological solution for this. I had some suggestions on using software tools, but they were rather theoretical examples). The “implicit knowledge” of an employee is embedded in his beliefs, experiences, networks, interests, and activities. In order to make this available to the company and to others in the company, other people must be enabled to know what someone “knows” and also enable people to have some kind of access to that knowledge. This access should not be immediate but mediated by the knowledge owner in order to avoid the i-have-this-job-because-i-know-something-you-don’t-know-syndrome.

Anyway, when I finally saw a company interested in going that direction, I thought I might share this with you and I hope that others will follow Visible Path in order to have a broader offering on the market.

Of course, since I did a lot of research and analysis with respect to this task, I am near-certain that Visible Path will make the same mistakes as those companies who ran for “Intranets” a while ago: Believing that technology can solve a psychologic inter-human problem. Technology should ease the work, but it’s definitely not a solution for knowledge-management’s inherent problems (which are described in detail in my Master Thesis, which, unfortunately, is in German only). I am also near-certain that a lot of companies will invest in services/products like those of Visible Path thinking that that will create a “learning company”, but after a while will realize that those investments work-out only, and only, if you have analyzed your company, your environment, trained people, set up defined processes, activities and so and… explained your employees in detail what you are doing, why you are doing it, and what they get out of for themselves.