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On Onboarding: An Excerpt from Thoughts from Learning 2011

January 6, 2012 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

The following is an excerpt on onboarding from Thoughts from Learning 2011, originally published November 18, 2011.

In the several sessions that I attended about onboarding at Learning 2011, I was pleased to see a real recognition and connection between the onboarding experience and long-term retention of employees. There are a few companies that are recognizing the needs of their newest employees, but there are still far too many people who treat onboarding like an event that is completed in short order. Orientation is an event that is part of the learning experience that is onboarding.

Part of the problem with onboarding as practiced now is in how it is measured. In a lot of cases, onboarding is being measured as a compliance issue—as in, we achieved 100% compliance and everyone has been through onboarding. The problem lies in the fact that it’s really easy (LMS) to track compliance—i.e. whether a person sat in chair or watched a computer-based piece of content—but it’s exceptionally difficult to track whether they engaged in an experience. In response to this, many companies turn to a survey, so they can ask employees how they “felt” about their onboarding experience. The problem here is that a feeling doesn’t translate into knowledge, practice, or behavior; and it certainly doesn’t address on-the-job performance.

In order to measure true effectiveness of an onboarding experience, you have to measure whether or not the participant is actually performing at the level you expected. And, that the realization of that performance has had a tangible effect on the business. Assuming you have an effective workforce and are profitable (and that may be a big assumption), then you can move on to measurements that relate to degrees of better, faster, and my least favorite, cost avoidance. I’m going to save more musings on measurement for a future blog post, but there is another reason to ask how you can justify designing an integrated onboarding experience. In the words of keynote speaker President Bill Clinton, “if you already have the truth, the evidence doesn’t matter.” Good luck selling that up your management chain.

Themes from the Fall CLO Symposium: Game-Changers and the New Normal

October 28, 2011 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost a full two weeks since I have returned from the scenic vistas of Laguna Niguel and the intellectual stimulation of the Fall CLO Symposium. As lovely as the scenery was, I will try to keep my focus on the intellectual pursuits. But allow me this one intrusion:

Laguna Nigel Resort

Now that I have that out of my system, the theme of the conference was “Game-Changing Learning: Development for the New Normal.” And while there were definitely some sessions focused on the old normal—how do I leverage my LMS and measure how many butts in seats I pushed through last year—there were also some refreshing perspectives that really align with our commitment to integrated learning.

The conference kicked off with Steven M.R. Covey and his keynote based on The Speed of Trust. The Media 1 management staff has all been through this program, and it has taught us quite a bit about how we work with each other. Reviewing this material reminded me how trust is critical when we talk about justifying our efforts not only to our clients, but also as we carry the vision up to their senior leadership at their companies. In retrospect, this also speaks to another major theme of the conference: measurement. It occurs to me that there is sometimes a difference between justification and measurement, and I wonder what it says about our trust levels when we use measurement of volume as justification for effectiveness. I would propose that trust, when properly established, allows us to let go of soft numbers linked to volume of effort and places focus on the hard numbers that reflect moving our businesses forward.

Covey’s keynote was soon followed by a panel of thought leaders including my friends from the Internet Time Alliance—Jay Cross (@jaycross), Clark Quinn (@Quinnovator), and Jane Hart (@C4LTP). In this somewhat controversial segment, several issues were explored, including whether or not the ADDIE model (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate) was really still relevant in a day and age where user-generated content and informal content has become more prominent. That prompted my thought, and subsequent tweet:

Does every problem we need to face need to be analyzed? Does every analysis have a solution that needs to be designed, and does every design need to be developed?

I would argue that the role of corporate training and learning professionals is transforming and evolving away from being ADDIE-driven content factories and is now aligning closer to being curators. This also lead to a discussion on whether or not the Kirkpatrick model was still valid for measuring training—see a pattern yet? It’s not that the Kirkpatrick model is inherently bad, just many of our interpretations fall short of being valuable. If we only make it through the first two levels—that is, whether or not people are happy and whether or not they remember—that may be enough to justify our efforts, but did it really help us evaluate whether or not we are having an impact on the business?

Another highlight was Bob Mosher (@bmosh) from LearningGuide Solutions on becoming an agile learning organization. The premise of Bob’s talk was his experience in guiding his clients toward learning that is more strategic and aligns with the strategy of the business. Bob believes informal learning and social learning opportunities offer performance support that is both effective and practical. Bob also echoed my sentiment that we need to look at the role of the corporate training department differently; that it’s not as much about creating content as is about creating usable context and integration.

By far, my favorite session was with Dan Pontefract (@dpontefract) from Telus talking about “The Rise of Collaboration in Learning, Leadership and 2.0 Technologies.” Dan is an open and frank speaker who pulls no punches in his evaluation of traditional learning functions in companies. Dan, perhaps more than any other learning professional I’ve talked to lately, has a clear vision for shifting learning from a series of disconnected events to an INTEGRATED, connected, continuous and collaborative process. He also has the technical infrastructure to prove it—built in SharePoint™ to boot! I left Dan’s session charged up that someone else gets our vision and came up with solutions that in many ways echo the types of solutions we are building for our clients. Check out Dan’s blog Trainingwreck; you’ll be glad you did.

All in all, of course we hear what we want to hear, and I heard people starting to talk about the sorts of things that my team and I are passionate about—and I am excited. I feel that I am energized and eager to help my clients carve out their own little piece of the transformation that we are in the middle of. Sure I heard a lot of the old normal too—like how we do we stop our employees from saying stuff we don’t agree with and new ways to spin all the old numbers. But there is enough evidence of the “new normal” taking hold to make me believe that we really can change the game.

Branding and User Acceptance of SharePoint Sites

In my last post, Pizza and SharePoint™—Branding and Design, I drew an analogy between presenting your best work to your customers without presenting your best selves to your employees in terms of the systems and sites developed for internal use. But why is it so hard to gain user acceptance and what sorts of things can we do to make it easier on ourselves? Why do we even care if your employees “accept” sites we build for them?

It’s easy enough to operate from the perspective that there is certain information that employees “need” to do their job, and there is certain information that is “nice to have.” In corporate structures, critical information or the “need to have” information is often presented in the most expedient way possible. Very often expediency in design results in the employee having to jump through hoops to get the information. “It’s the best we could do, in the time we had.”

While we may have accomplished our basic goals for a site, it doesn’t mean we did a good job. In fact, if we aren’t careful, we may actually create new issues in the process. If we didn’t gain acceptance of the platform we used for the initiative, chances are we’ve:

Poisoned the platform for future use by leaving a negative first impression.
Used too much time ($) to achieve too little tangible results.
Sent a message that we don’t value our users.

While it is sometimes necessary to compromise good design for expediency, we pay a heavy price for failing to gain acceptance. When we do gain acceptance, we achieve our goals faster, cheaper, and we create repeat visits that give us a viable way to expand our goals and create something sustainable over time. AND, we send a message that we care enough to think things through and value our team.

So why, when it comes to SharePoint sites, is it so hard to design for acceptance?

When building informational or community sites, SharePoint acts as a content management system, or CMS, and allows us to present the data separately and in different contexts. This means the data or information is contained in a different technical structure than the look and feel, or branding of the site. This is wonderful when it comes to keeping the content up-to-date, but requires a little extra planning when designing page layouts that support content that is meant to be changed independent of the layout. That seems to be where many implementations fall short.

I.T. departments are typically charged with implementing systems, such as SharePoint, and while your mileage may vary, they generally do a very good job of implementing the functionality or data layer… and tend to pay very little attention to the presentation layer. The typical result is a perfectly functional data infrastructure with a bone-stock, straight from the vanilla Microsoft set of page templates. Since SharePoint wasn’t designed to fulfill a specific need from a specific audience, not much care was taken with these stock templates. Frankly, I find them ugly and filled with usability issues, and I am not alone. Nonetheless, as SharePoint is rolled out, content owners are very often forced to use these templates either expressly or because they aren’t informed that they have any control over the presentation and don’t have the knowledge of how to change it.

In many organizations, a user’s first exposure to SharePoint is an ugly, usability-challenged site, a “crew pie” to reference my previous post. They may need the information that the site contains, but they are often left frustrated and unimpressed. For organizations that recognize this failing, this typically results in a subsequent project to improve either:

Look and feel (branding)
Usability

The truth is you need to do both. If you fix the content organization and improve the usability, it’s hard for the user to get past the ugly and truly engage with the site. If you fix the ugly but leave the usability out, you may get your users back briefly, but they will inevitably get frustrated again. User acceptance of a site means they accept both the way a site looks AND the way it works.

Usability is a topic for another article, but for organizations that have already fallen into the bad- or no-design trap, a good design can help them crawl out of the user acceptance hole. It sends a message that this site is worthwhile and important enough to warrant thoughtful design, and likewise the users of the site are important and valued enough to warrant the time and money spent on design. For those organizations that haven’t rolled out their first sites, let this serve as a tip:

Whether you call it branding, look and feel, or design, it’s a critical piece of user acceptance.

In the next entry, we’ll focus on usability some more, starting with setting realistic objectives and how to map those objectives to the functionality you design into your sites.

Pizza and SharePoint™—Branding and Design

September 1, 2011 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away… I used to work for one of the giant pizza chains. As a learning professional, I took it upon myself to understand what it was like to work in a pizza store. You don’t have to be in a store for too long before a mistake happens. Wrong toppings, giant bubbles, or just plain ugly pizzas. Most operators had enough sense not to send these pizzas to the customer and would make a new pizza, but instead of wasting $3 in food cost and throwing out the mistake, these pizzas would become “crew pies” and would often sit boxed on top of the oven until someone had time for a break and would grab a slice or two.

Well, on one store trip, I noticed a sign on the wall that said “no crew pies.” My first reaction was that the store operator was sending a message about mistakes, and not making them, but the company had all sorts of slogans and signs about making quality product and “no crew pies” was not one of them, so I had to ask.

Turns out the operator had much different reasons, and it wasn’t a slogan; it was a rule. He explained to me that he was in a war for good employees with the other restaurants in town. It was hard to find and keep people, and he felt that it sent the wrong message to serve the people that worked for him the worst product his store turned out. Besides, if his team thought that bad pizza was good enough for them, how far of a stretch is it for them to expect his customers to live with bad pizza?

Fast forward to today. I am in the privileged position of consulting with some of the world’s largest companies. Companies that are selling customers some of the most advanced systems, services, and technology available. However, all too often the internal sites these companies use to support their own employees are the internet equivalent of “crew pies.” Barely branded and poorly organized. This is especially true when it comes to SharePoint™ sites.

It’s not enough to just have the information out there. The person has to first want to use the site (acceptance) and then be able to use the site (usability). Newsflash: The default SharePoint™ page templates are not attractive and are not intuitively usable. Even if you are lucky enough to have an IT department that branded the default templates, it most likely is still not good enough. Chances are if you already have an existing SharePoint™ implementation, you’ve seen these default templates in action, as have your users. They have already formed a negative impression of what SharePoint™ is and have little or no vision of what its potential is.

I’m not suggesting that all of your internal sites become graphical Flash sites with splash pages, but I am saying that at a cursory glance, your internal sites need to:

Not look like SharePoint™ default templates
Reflect the importance of the people, business line, product or service it is intended to support

In SharePoint™ development circles, efforts towards user acceptance are often referred to as branding, but it’s more than that; it’s part of the overall design. The goal of design should be a positive or at least transparent user experience. There are two components of user experience, acceptance and usability. Acceptance is typically the result of good positioning and good visual design whereas usability stems from information design.

If we go back to our “crew pie” example, mistake pizzas may in fact taste good, but the user experience is disrupted because admittedly user acceptance is compromised: the pizza is ugly or its usability is challenged—it has the wrong stuff. That’s not to say the crew won’t eat it, but they may not like it.

The intangible message here is that our internal sites and systems set the tone for what our employees deliver to our customers or users, and it’s imperative that our customer’s user experience be flawless. Besides, in a war for talent, our valued employees deserve better than a “crew pie.”

In my next blog post, we’ll dive more into the user acceptance side of the equation and explore some strategies for designing and validating user acceptance as part of a branding, positioning, or graphic design effort.

Keynotes from Strategies 2011: Creating an Explosion of Innovation

May 5, 2011 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

I found the Strategies 2011 keynote address on creating cultures of innovation from Frans Johansson, author of The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts and Cultures, incredibly insightful and very interesting. So much so, that I’ve recently shared his insights with the team here at Media 1. Several of our project managers have his book on their shelves, and I’m looking forward to reading it myself.

Johansson’s main point: diversity drives innovation and future leaders need to know how to leverage diversity to create intersections of ideas, or what he calls “The Medici Effect.”

In his keynote at Strategies 2011, Johansson clearly and persuasively showed what happens when different cultures collide. They can ignite an explosion of extraordinary new ideas and discoveries. At the intersection of widely differing perspectives, we can come up with BETTER ideas and, with diverse teams, we can come up with MORE of them.

We’re all seeking innovation and ways to foster talent who can launch the next corporate renaissance. Johansson points out that to change organizations, we need to encourage collaboration and sharing between different perspectives and cultures, and we need to allow “out of the box” thinking to move quickly from idea to implementation.

Mapping Engagement Models to the Development / Talent Life Cycle

April 27, 2011 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

My last blog post talked about engagement and maintaining engagement throughout the talent life cycle. In this entry, I want to focus on learning framework models that target engagement at key points in the talent life cycle.

The idea is that if you match a learning framework to the needs of the learner at a specific point in their development, you greatly increase the likelihood of engagement with the learning experience. This is more than learner preference or style; it is about tailoring presentation or context to performance factors.

Consider this: when employees first start with your organization or change roles, it can be easier to engage them, but harder to get real performance. They are excited, typically self-motivated, but may lack the skills that make up the competencies needed to perform. To effectively develop these employees, a high degree of direction is needed.

As the employee begins to acquire knowledge and skill and some level of job competency, it’s easier for disillusionment to set in. Skill has increased but engagement may drop. With the honeymoon phase over, they just aren’t as naturally excited as they used to be. The employee still needs direction, but also has an increased need for support behavior to continue to be engaged. A great way to accomplish this at this point in the development cycle is to use coaching or mentoring, and perhaps a stretch assignment to break up the routine.

When employees start to achieve mastery of knowledge, they need less direction but continue to need higher support behavior, and engagement can vary. Only when both knowledge and engagement align at a high level do you get optimum performance. When engagement is high and competency is achieved, that employee needs less directive and supportive development efforts. Best practices and sharing amongst peers can have a dramatic effect on your business when people get to this point.

So how does this map into frameworks for delivering engagement?

Curriculums and frameworks to address low competency are highly directive or task-based like the models we have developed and use for Onboarding. The objective here is to present a logical progression of digestible knowledge over time—the right knowledge at the right time, immediately applicable on-the-job.

As job competency is achieved, it’s critical to add social and coaching elements more like what is found in a comprehensive cohort curriculum. Cohorts to support moderate levels of competency should contain directive assignments and coaching and/or mentoring components. These should be your “highest touch” training curriculums.

As more competencies are achieved, less task-based direction is needed. Cohorts focused on audiences with higher function can be more about applied exercises and less about knowledge-based learning, but until competencies are achieved, employees will continue to need a high touch from mentors or coaches.

People who have achieved a high level of competency are either at the top of their role or the top of your organization and will tolerate very little in terms of task-based formal learning activities or coaching, but will engage with and learn from each other. This is where Communities of Practice can really work and be self-sustaining. Best practices and sharing about practical applications of knowledge can be acted upon to drive the organization to new heights.

While this is a general guideline to the engagement approach for different levels of your organization, you also have to realize that this cycle repeats itself constantly for employees as they move through your talent management cycle. For example, let’s take a look at a new manager who has been with your organization for two years. At the enterprise or curriculum level, we expect them to be best served by a cohort or task-based cohort model. From a functional or content level they have high engagement, they are going to need more direction in the beginning, and their needs are going to be more in line with a task-based system.

It’s also important to note that engagement is hardest to achieve in the middle of a development cycle where commitment levels are variable. If onboarding fails to engage when an employee starts, engagement will be extremely difficult to re-establish as they develop. It’s here that you run the greatest risk of costly turnover and talent drain.

While developing competency is critical to the performance of your company, achieving engagement is just as critical to growth, innovation, and your ability to attract and maintain a high level of talent. Targeted delivery frameworks give context and level-appropriate structure to curriculums to help you achieve both, which we all know is vital to the long-term success of our companies.

Overheard at Strategies 2011: Employee Engagement

March 16, 2011 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

Media 1 is pushing hard into the Human Capital Improvement space with SharePoint-based offerings for cohort learning (leadership and sales) and Onboarding. To learn more about the concerns and needs of people involved in talent management and development, we decided to attend MediaTec’s Strategies 2011 conference in Half Moon Bay, CA.

What a fantastic location and a great conference filled with key learning around diversity, inclusion, and techniques for managing and developing the workforce. However, the concept that I want to focus in on is that of employee engagement. Engagement isn’t a term that I have used a lot before now, but it’s one ingrained in the talent management lexicon.

It’s a great term because it encompasses and describes a level of involvement and commitment regardless of the development level or stage that an employee is in. While consulting on Onboarding systems, one of our primary goals is to increase time-to-productivity, but if we want higher levels of productivity, we have to get engagement first. A new hire can be modestly productive without engagement, but that hire won’t reach an optimum level of performance unless that person is truly engaged with their position and your company.

Beyond the Onboarding development phase, engagement is just as important. As we move through our careers, our level of engagement is variable; it waxes and wanes over time. Again we may have employees that are productive, but not engaged. Development opportunities in the form of corporate learning are one tool that talent managers have to re-establish, increase, or maintain engagement throughout the talent life cycle.

Looking back at the conference, it occurs to me that I saw a lot of curriculums designed to address engagement, but the really impressive ones paid as much attention to how the curriculum was delivered as they did to the curriculums themselves. In all cases, engagement programs were not single learning events or courses, but included a series of different kinds of learning opportunities delivered over a period of time. None stated it as such, but the net effect of the approach is the creation of a robust “learning experience.”

The more advanced engagement models also took into account where the employee was in their development within the organization. New employees have very different development needs than top executives, and their motivation and engagement levels will also vary widely. While that is the common-sense practical application of different engagement models for different types of learners and content, it also aligns with commonly accepted theories of employee development stages and talent management cycles.

I’m thinking deeply on how SharePoint-based curriculum frameworks can be targeted and mapped to specific phases in career development and how that can translate into better engagement and better performance. Stay tuned.

More Thoughts on Mobile Learning

January 13, 2011 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

Here at Media 1, we’ve been looking at mobile for quite a few years now, and my personal experience experimenting with mobile goes back to the Palm® Pilot days. The trick with mobile has always been overcoming the hurdles associated with varying platforms, sufficient bandwidth, LMS connectivity, and being able to produce compelling content. While all of those challenges to mobile are still present, the general sense is that mobile is truly becoming more accessible.

Several viable authoring systems are now available that allow you to develop once and deliver to the vast majority of platforms, while the mobile devices themselves have larger screens and better connectivity. Many LMS now have mobile-specific connectivity, leading us to the remaining challenge of creating compelling content. Having Adobe® Flash available on almost every platform (with the exception of the iPhone) certainly helps, but much of the content I’ve seen still lacks an engagement factor. The mobile content that appears to be most successful is different in two ways:

It is framed as performance support, not training.
It is focused on messaging, not use of media.

When it comes to performance support, one of the best applications I’ve seen was a product-related reference guide from Sephora and JC Penney. Delivered via iPad, the content provided both product fact and application techniques for beauty products in a manner that was both educational for the consultant and shareable with the customer. While it wasn’t executed on a phone-based mobile device, I think it’s indicative of the types of mobile content that can be deployed successfully.

Absent the larger format of the iPad or Flash-based content, other successful mobile performance applications display an awareness of good writing and storytelling. People read books all the time. Books don’t have animations and rarely have pictures, yet publishing remains a multibillion dollar industry. Text is easily displayed across almost all devices. It’s logical that we re-frame our concept of what engaging mobile content is to include writing that is compelling and not just a collection of fragmented bullet points from a slide deck. Think back to the text-based discovery games of the early 90’s and how maybe some of those principles could be applied to writing for mobile.

There is also huge upside to performance support delivered via e-reader devices. Both Kindle and Nook now have educational text branches of their business focused on the education market. But for corporate practitioners, what’s not to like? Big Screens, non-fatiguing text, wireless connectivity, and falling prices for hardware make this segment one to watch.

While good writing for text-based content is critical, the untapped potential for all mobile devices is in how they can be leveraged for around-the-clock access to Social Learning communities behind the corporate firewall. Take a look at how much activity on Facebook and Twitter is now originating from mobile devices. Now imagine how much more use your corporate community could get if it was accessible from phone-based mobile devices.

I believe that eventually we will see compelling content on phone-based devices, but I also believe that tablets and e-readers represent a significant opportunity. They serve as an excellent stepping stone that can help us define and produce good mobile content without some of the constraints of the smartphone. As mobile moves forward, we also have to figure out realistic ways to allow mobile devices access to content behind the corporate firewall.

For more perspectives on mobile, check out Chris Willis’ prior post “Mobile Learning – Are You Ready?”

Learning 2010 and DevLearn 2010: Social Learning and Communities

November 15, 2010 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

It’s been a busy last couple of weeks as I travelled to both Orlando for the Learning 2010 conference and to San Francisco for a portion of DevLearn. Attending sessions on Social Learning and Communities at both conferences, it wasn’t so much about learning new things as it was a confirmation of our beliefs and writings on Social Learning to date. It’s always nice to get some validation, but more importantly it’s an indicator of overall corporate readiness to adopt Social Learning principles into learning strategies.

It was also nice to see that there were quite a few companies who have chosen Microsoft SharePoint as the underlying technology for their efforts. However it was disappointing to see many of the sites shown showed little attention to aesthetics, user experience, or true collaboration. SharePoint is capable of so much more. Not only can it look great, but you can also mash-up work flows, forms, discussion, and blog elements to form a cohesive community with true collaborative functionality.

Beyond SharePoint, there were a number of key take-a-ways for those developing communities based on any technology platform. Probably the most pervasive sentiment was that communities are so much more than a collection of functionality. You can build the sexiest community site with chat integration, message boards, blogs, tagging and all the rest, but still see low usage rates if you don’t plan for more than just the functional community framework.

At some point at Learning 2010, I read an interesting tweet from a well known and respected colleague at Intel, Allison Anderson. She wondered “Why is it when we do create and open environment, we get low participation?”

Successful corporate communities have ownership, a pre-planned group of super-contributors, and are centered on functions or tasks that people want — and need — to have conversations about. Not every group within your organization needs a community, but when you plan carefully and pick the right focus areas you may hit on a community that has the potential to become self-sustaining.

Another question heard quite often at both conferences was in effect: “How do I control what people put up on the community?” The knee-jerk answer to this question is that you have to monitor it closely, but the truth is that you shouldn’t have to. People have to be allowed to have opinions, and if those opinions cross the line to misinformation or slander, then most companies already have a way with dealing with that. The point is in order for communication to open and active, there has to be trust. It can be a balance, but you have to temper trust and control.

I also overheard another comment in the crowd about how popular their community was at first, but how a year later it had virtually died out. While this person was looking for suggestions on re-energizing their community, it got me thinking about whether or not this was a bad thing. Sometimes, groups have a logical lifespan. It’s not always a bad thing when a conversation has run its course; it can mean that the topic has reached a new baseline of competence, and that has to be a good thing.

My final thought in retrospect on these two great conferences in respect to Social Learning Communities, is that we have to find a way to make our communities accessible and relevant on mobile devices. I find myself increasingly relying on my mobile device for my own social networking activities and would dare say it surpasses my desktop use by a good margin. I can’t help feeling that our busy, travelling, and multi-tasking team members feel the same way. While many social networking platforms include some mobile page support, SharePoint included, gaining secure access from a mobile device remains elusive in environments that require hardware/software security and encryption.

Looking to the future of corporate communities and social learning the potential is clearly evident. However, that potential can only be fully realized with care full attention to:

Design and planning for the function AND use of the community
Appropriate topics and focus areas
Trust
Accessibility and usability from both desk-based and mobile devices

Media 1 can help you plan and build SharePoint communities that work. For more perspective on corporate communities, check out my prior blog “Communities of Practice: Batteries Not Included”.

Knowledge sourcing – the practical side of knowledge management

October 8, 2010 / Harrison Withers / 0 Comments

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?

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