Following on from his managing stress article, Peter Bond, director of Learning Futures Consulting, gives an overview of his guide to getting the most out of Web 2.0 technologies through KM and the principles of the learning organisation. 

We are all very familiar with social networking platforms such as MySpace, Flikr, YouTube, Twitter, Bebo and Facebook. They are almost household names. This is not so of a new generation of social networking technology, which is being used to provide software services under trading names such as Ning, CollectiveX, Sossoon, Hiitch, Huddle, Mzinga, British Telecom’s Workspace (project management), Clearspace, and even Microsoft’s Sharepoint. Others are appearing so frequently, it’s difficult to keep abreast of the launches.

We are still in the relative early stage of this kind of platform development and there is a deal of difference in the functionalities offered by each. But typically, the new integrated platforms will have some combination of the following services: the blog, the wiki, the multimedia knowledge repository (with search capability), the discussion forum, user profiling with match capability, conversational spaces for subgroups or workplace communities, private conversational spaces for subgroups, customisable member pages, event registration and subscription payment systems, together with high levels of security (access control) and member management through an administration system.

Already, some platforms offer the facility to incorporate additional functionality using widgets (plug-ins), but the potential is as yet underdeveloped. The future is likely to see incorporation of more powerful tools for serious and professional networking such as are now available separately, e.g. collaborative mind mapping, white boards, video conferencing, and possible incorporation of phone based systems with VOIP capability.

CollectiveX, Mzinga and Clearspace are explicitly targeting corporate users and offer their software services as alternative corporate intranets and workplace community support platforms. However, the whole family of services has this potential. They are the new generation of groupware, with the possibility of becoming the new generation of knowledge management system, but with a major difference.

The difference lies in enabling and encouraging users to share knowledge they feel is of value in the workplace, and in allowing it to flow and grow in an online collaborative space where actors are able to decide amongst themselves what is useful and what is not. Such a repository can truly reflect the knowing of practitioners and is naturally more accessible, and therefore more usable, because creator-users have expressed their knowing in their own language, their idiom, their style of talking about their problems and their solutions.

Enabling knowledge sharing between problem owners in this way is of course not new if you recall what Kaizen teams did to improve the performance of Japanese manufacturers in the 1980s. What is different, and more challenging to senior and middle managers, is the scalability. The whole-of-enterprise reach these new software services are capable of permitting is very easily extended downstream to suppliers, upstream to customers (to better integrate with the market), to focus groups, product testers, to host community stakeholders, and cross-stream to collaborators.

However, there is a paradox to be faced and dealt with. Like the internet itself, online collaborative space-making technologies are inherently democratic, libertarian and hold the potential for events to escape the control of enterprise managers. If you are a manager seeking to trigger a revolution in product or service design then Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 is definitely for you. If you are not, take care. To begin with, it will likely have the effect of dissolving the hierarchical structures upon which conventional management depends for control.

How does management respond to this? Traditional senior and middle managers, who have been taught to assure operational predictability by securing tight control over workforce behaviour and events, must be prepared to manage in a different and more subtle way. The reward for a controlled implementation, approached with a high degree of professionalism, is a system which will likely reap benefits for all involved.

The risk is the subversion of extant company practices and lore. Even if you believe your company needs a radical shakeup, the direction and process of change has to remain under the influence of senior management. There is also the challenge of using the new technology creatively within existing departmental structures (HR, manufacturing, design, marketing, market research and customer relations management) and to support cross departmental collaboration in search of organisational innovation and new patterns of working.

Undoubtedly, it will work best when there is a climate of trust in which senior managers welcome, even relish, a challenge to their ideas and policies.

This guide outlines a process of competence building in the management of Web 2.0 technologies based on five levels of understanding about how individual learning contributes to organisational learning and performance improvement.

The first chapter will provide a brief overview of the kinds of the kinds of Web 2.0 services mentioned above. Each of the following five chapters will cover the levels of understanding in turn. These represent the concepts foundation necessary to understand the strategy and associated competence set in the management of Web 2.0 technology.

The five levels of understanding are as follows.

1. To comprehend how an individual player learns to perform and then to improve as an integral part of the whole enterprise.

2. To fully understand how new learning is shared between individual player-learners to create a cultural space conducive to knowledge sharing and collective learning.

3. To appreciate the function of conversation in community creation, maintenance and change.

4. To grasp how Web 2.0 technologies enable the creation, maintenance and growth of an exceptionally enhanced web of free flowing conversations, through which a knowledge sharing and learning infrastructure is maintained (KSLI). The KSLI is the foundation for any performance improvement or planned organisational change initiative.

5. To recognise that such knowledge sharing and learning infrastructures are highly open and democratic, are self-organising and self-directing, and, therefore, are potentially revolutionary and demanding of radically different managing strategies.

Click here to read the first chapter of Improved collective performance: Why organisations should invest in developing competence in the management of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technology (free download).