Why are blogs and wikis useful knowledge sharing tools?
The latest McKinsey Global Survey Results (June 2009) surveyed 1,700 executives globally about the value their organisations are gaining from using web 2.0.
The interesting thing about the report is that more executives are acknowledging that they are seeing measurable benefits (my emphasis). This is significant progress. Business people like measurable benefits. That’s the language and outcome that gets a hearing.
The benefits tracked are across various usages – internally in organisations, externally with customers and with business supplier and partners.
Externally, they benefit relationships – bringing the organisation closer to customers and suppliers and in some instances allowing them to innovate together. A number of companies reported lower communication and travel costs.
Some companies reported have been able to track revenue increases from improved customer interactions. You may have read about the CBA mortgage approval where a blunt tweet from a potential customer hit the radar of the head of customer service. While the tool provides almost instant notification, the organisational will must be there to track the conversations, and act to respond to or resolve problems.
The most heavily used technologies are blogs, wikis and podcasts, and this preference goes across both organisations and consumers. That’s not surprising, for not only are those technologies incredibly easy to use, but it doesn’t take much to create a useful information asset in them. By that I mean that they take shape quickly provided the contribution is there. Tools like Yammer (the enterprise Twitter equivalent), which is essentially speedy information exchange, can sometimes be harder to embed.
A key point in relation to the use of the tools internally was that they needed to be tightly integrated into the workflows of employees. That sounds a bit self-evident, but too often we train people on how to use new tools, but not on why. The ‘why’ got asked and answered in the business case, and becomes a hulking great assumption from then on. Asking ‘why would I use this’, ‘in what circumstance would I use this’ and importantly ‘what can this replace’ are critical to take-up. The importance of this in a knowledge management context was highlighted in a CSC paper some years ago – The Fusion of Process and Knowledge Management.
We distilled these concepts into some KM guiding prnciples, but they easily relate to web 2.0 tools as well:
- Make the use of the tools part of the way people work.
- Embed the use of the tools in your key business processes.
- Target business processes that deliver real benefits to teams: save time, cut costs, prevent errors, simplify activities.
The benefits to organisations were greater ability to share ideas, improved access to experts, and better employee satisfaction.
And that’s where wikis, blogs and podcasts have a great ROI. Every information asset in those toolsets (a blog post or a wiki entry) has a person’s name attached to it. So depending on where you are using them, an organisation can create an expert register at the same time it is capturing knowledge and sharing information.