The concept of knowledge management has been part of the business lexicon for a long a time, the concept being that if companies could find a way to capture knowledge from across their organizations, that they could become more agile, more responsive (profit), and avoid mistakes (cost). A noble and well-thought cause, knowledge management seemed to hit a fever pitch in 2002 with numerous companies installing knowledge management systems and a few companies even hiring CKO’s or Chief Knowledge Officers. While still an important concern, it seems the concept of knowledge management has somewhat faded.

Why has such an important initiative seemingly suffered in our collective consciousness? While we could speculate on a great many number of reasons, it is safe to say at least in part that knowledge management has faded is because it’s really hard to do. On the data collection and meta-tagging side of the equation, most traditional approaches to knowledge management involve time-consuming inventories and cross-references of expertise. Systems that support these inventories have been notoriously expensive and cumbersome. And still, they seem to fall short of any predictive reasoning, in that they can’t really anticipate how the knowledge seeker will frame the query for expertise.

However, as many things in life go, while our corporations have struggled to find answers, employees have just figured out a way to get done what they need to do their jobs. They have turned to social media. While knowledge management pundits build systems and complexity, employees are clearly voting with their keyboards. The message we should all be hearing is that what we need in the near term is knowledge sourcing, or the ability to connect with people that have specific expertise in a just-in-time way.

Not to say that knowledge management doesn’t have value, just that knowledge sourcing as a concept fits into the way people work and gather information. It’s not even that knowledge sourcing is new; our companies have always used social occasions to network with the implied intent of getting to know what other expertise exists in the enterprise. Whether around the water cooler or in company-wide meetings, social interaction has always been a convenient part of our working social networks. However, as our organizations become more and more distributed, these social opportunities have decreased. In response, technology driven social networks have grown in importance.

There are two ways in which we leverage social media for knowledge sourcing; the first is in a general way and the second is need-based. In the first model we are taking mental notes associating expertise with people based on social interactions we have with them. For example, to colleagues are talking about a common social interest like gardening, eventually the two individuals inquire what each does for the company. Say the first person is a sales person while the second is an engineer that specializes in a specific product. Some time passes, and sales person finds themselves in a conversation about that very product. The sales person recalls his or her good gardening buddy, the engineer. Had the initial conversation been just about the company, the sales person may never have remembered that the person was an engineer or had any specific product expertise, but since there was the added association with gardening, that dramatically increases the likelihood of remembering details about the individual.

The second, need-based model is far more direct. With pervasiveness of social networking, micro blogging has become a viable just in time resource for knowledge sourcing. Again, not a new concept, we’ve all done the same thing via email for years. Simply put who knows about “x” in an email and copy the world, and then repeatedly hit refresh until an answer magically appears. Of course the tragic downfall is that the one guy who actually knows and can help is busy and assumes one of the other 100 people you copied on the email actually got back to you. Alternatively, you could post the request to a message board, in which case you get responses in context, but there is no guarantee that the expert will have seen your post or that you received timely exposure. The advantage micro blogging presents is immediate exposure and that people can see and are notified of follow-ups, aka that one guy can see if no one responded or responded incorrectly or partially. This makes Knowledge sourcing via micro blogging both timely and complete.

The real power of knowledge sourcing in the social media world is best seen in context of this second example. Imagine a world were a sales person goes into a meeting with the collective knowledge and support of the entire company. A world where answers are sourced in minutes whereas the answer used to be: “I’ll have to get back to you on that.” Isn’t that why we wanted knowledge management in the first place?