Social Glass

I had an amicable debate today with a co-worker about the role of Groups, or Moderators, in an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem. I must admit I’d previously discarded any notion of content moderation as it tends to stand as a barrier and discourages contribution, but now I’m thinking twice.

My colleague worked in the content management space for a few years and he’d recently been across a project helping a client setup a new extensive knowledge management system.  So, he knows his stuff. Regarding Enterprise 2.0, his point was this (and I’m paraphrasing), “Large enterprises are used to implementing knowledge management software with controls - gateways that content must pass through before being approved for public use - and the notion of unbridled content being published with little or no review process or standard seems chaotic and irresponsible.”

To expand on this point, say, for example, a telecommunications knowledge worker creates a wiki page about the sequence in which carrier codes should be manually associated with broadband service when the automated system fails. A subsequent search with the phrase “carrier codes manual” on the Enterprise Search system yields the new wiki page as the 3rd result. Is the content to be trusted? Can the instructions on the wiki page be followed verbatim? Enterprise 2.0 advocates would say “maybe not, but if it’s wrong the content can be corrected by the next knowledge worker”. True. As the theory goes over time collective intelligence will evolve enterprise content towards correctness. But, for the time being, inputting an incorrect sequence of carrier codes delays the order by 2 weeks (retail/wholesale setup), and this costs the telco $5,000 in additional fees.

In this case the enterprise cannot afford to have this incorrect information cascade across the enterprise, at least not when there’s no distinction between approved content and tacit content, and this, according to my co-worker, is why we need Groups and Moderation.

The idea is that a subset of the organisation, so-called experts in a given and perhaps general area, are tasked with moderating content within a subject domain. These moderators are then held partially accountable for the correctness of the content within their domain. In this way knowledge workers have more reason to trust the information they’re discovering through Search.

To me this sounds reasonable, especially in the early days when companies are just starting to look at Enterprise 2.0. Moderation might settle the angst of those knowledge management traditionalists.