Social Glass

Here’s a little presentation I put together summarizing the Enterprise Knowledge Market (EKM).

Update: http://www.slideshare.net/jgrahamthomas/the-enterprise-knowledge-market-v12.

Mediawiki is the popular, open source wiki application that powers wikipedia. Many organizations run mediawiki on their intranets including Avenue A Razorfish. One of the issues with the out of the box version of mediawiki is its categorization (or tagging) feature. Users are required to type the text “[Category:” followed by the category, then “]” (”[Category:design]”, for example) on the wiki page.

While this does not seem overly complicated it, becomes very difficult for users to reuse categories as there’s no feature on the edit page that shows them which categories have already been used. As a result, we might end up with two categories “design” and “designs” that should be the same.

A colleague of mine, Andreas Rindler, has solved this problem with a mediawiki Category Suggest extension.

CategorySuggest provides a Google Suggest like functionality to the edit page of articles. A separate “Categories” input box is added below the article page. When a user starts typing the name of an existing category, the extension retrieves a list of existing categories from the Mediawiki database and suggests matches to the user. The user can either type the name of a new extension or pick from the list of suggested categories.

Click over to his blog post describing the extension for a better overview.

I’d like to direct your attention to an article I just posted over at openmethodology.org called “The Enterprise Knowledge Market” (note I am affiliated with openmethodology.org through my company). It expands on a blog post I wrote some time back on the topic. The conclusion of the article provides a good overview:

As demonstrated, the Enterprise Knowledge Market efficiently discovers and exposes enterprise information assets in an effort to recognize the knowledge workers who author them. The most valuable information assets are given the most visibility. Visibility leads to recognition, and knowledge workers compete for recognition. Competition fuels participation, and participation increases the number of qualify knowledge assets at the enterprise’s disposal. This raises the likelihood that innovative ideas will be discovered, and innovation helps the enterprise remain competitive.

Andrew McAfee makes an insightful point about the value of social networking within the enterprise. He discusses the strength of weak ties and shows how casual relationships broaden the diversity of knowledge available to a knowledge worker. Strong ties result from “long-term, frequent, and sustained interactions”, whereas weak ties arise “from infrequent and more casual” interactions.

Given that knowledge workers “A”, “B” and “C” work for a given company, McAfee goes on to show that:

This might be a good thing in many ways, but it’s bad news if A needs a piece of knowledge that she can’t find inside her own friendship circle. Because of the overlap, B’s circle is likely to be redundant with A’s, and so unhelpful to her. In other words, her tie to B does her little good in her search for knowledge. If A and C have a weak tie, however, many of C’s friends are likely to be strangers to A, and so are good resources as she looks to inform herself.

I’m a visual learner and have drawn a simple diagram to illustrate this point. It shows that knowledge workers A and B, who share a strong tie and have a substantial overlap in their social networks, have access to a non-redundant group of knowledge workers through a weak tie between A and C. This relationship broadens the scope of information access for all groups, and this is very important for companies that rely on their knowledge workers to innovate.