Who Do You Know Who Knows…
I did a presentation on Social Computing at an event yesterday sponsored by Microsoft and NewsGator. Great turnout and excellent questions from an engaged audience. One of the more interesting topics was the Social Network Graph (see below) presented as part of the NewsGator Social Sites. There is an obvious ‘wow’ factor with a compelling image like this. The challenge is around getting past it and understanding the true business value. There were a few folks in the audience interested in the algorithm behind the mapping. Me? I’m OK with the mystery behind it. I’m more excited about the problem it helps solve…
One of the use cases that I often reference in an introductory SharePoint session is the value of SharePoint as a knowledge repository and the minimization of the classic email sent to all employees asking “does anyone know…?”. I use it for dramatic effect because I realize that it rarely occurs. More often, someone is clever enough to focus in on the right team and sends an email (I have received many!) to a manager that asks “who on your team knows…?”. Same impact; just more focused. What’s the difference? In the first scenario, knowledge sharing is everyone’s problem. In the second, the responsibility falls on the manager to ensure proper knowledge capture is occurring at the team level. Specifically, I do know exactly who on my team is best suited to answer a question about search or branding or web part deployment… and I also know that this information is not well captured in our portal to show it. I am in the way of social computing success! I need to do a better job of getting my team to catalog the expertise each carries (by publishing and tagging content, structured and unstructured) and I can monitor that through something like the Social Network Graph.
One of the great ways to break down a big problem like social computing success is to carve it up into lots of small wins and set accountability at a person or team level. I can’t change the way the organization shares but I can change the way my team does. In my book we use the term ‘delivering high impact collaboration’. To me, that has never been about the system replacing the people but rather the system facilitating “good” dialog among the “right” people.
Happy sharing!
