Ken Yarmosh – Product Strategist and Technology Connoisseur

In the case of the Web 2.0 Watermill, there are primarily four areas where technology is beginning to facilitate a vastly improved Internet: knowledge collection, knowledge discovery, knowledge building, and knowledge sharing.

- Ken Yarmosh, Why Web 2.0 Matters to your Business

Knowledge sharing is what enables employees to get their jobs done everyday. Without the knowledge and expertise of other co-workers, it is difficult for anything to get accomplished. That holds true regardless of the size of the company.

Thus, one of the biggest bottlenecks for growth relates to the inability to share knowledge. If Susan cannot ask Bob how much it costs to buy three hundred widgets under a tight budget, she will not be able to finish her proposal.

One of the big advancements in this area came through the local area network and file sharing. Now, even when Bob was sick, Susan had the ability to reference his pricing notes.

The web has played an important part in the development of knowledge sharing. More generally, the Internet has ushered in the “Information Age” – much of mankind’s knowledge is now accessible via the click of a mouse.

Blogs, wikis, RSS, and podcasts are all awesome methods to share knowledge within the organization. Knowledge sharing really is the primary focus of each of these technologies.

One quick example is how IBM has used podcasts to share information with their employees. Instead of mandating the time when people had to come or call-in to listen to talks, they made them available by podcast. Besides lowering phone bills, the employees could choose the best time to listen to the discussion – they didn’t have to be inconvenienced.

Other examples of Web 2.0 and knowledge sharing include using dark blogs and wikis. Each facilitate internal discussion, brainstorming, and more.

It is going to take some time but my hope is that Web 2.0 will really transform knowledge sharing behind corporate walls. Let’s face it, e-mail is not the most convenient means for employees to share information. Old or outdated files out on the servers just take up space. All the links and resources an employee has marked as “favorites” in his browser benefits no one except him.

These new tools can help with these issues but there is a prerequisite to benefit from their use – organizational acceptance. There must be a shift from employee competition to employee collaboration. And in order for that to occur, management has to present a convincing case why they should do so.

In the case of the Web 2.0 Watermill, there are primarily four areas where technology is beginning to facilitate a vastly improved Internet: knowledge collection, knowledge discovery, knowledge building, and knowledge sharing.

- Ken Yarmosh, Why Web 2.0 Matters to your Business

My series on Why Web 2.0 Matters to your Business has been defunct for quite some time (I was hoping to finish it back in January), so I am determined to complete it before writing on a handful of other topics. First, a refresher.

Background
I began by explaining what Web 2.0 is not – it’s not the next version of the web or a singular technical demarcation point. Instead, it is an effort to refocus and refine the web as we know it. As I articulated it,

Web 2.0 is an attempt to build the web around people instead of technology.

From there, I gave a high-level discussion about what I call the Web 2.0 Watermill. The point of this diagram is to provide a simple framework for the types of activities that Web 2.0 technology facilitates:

(note: There has been some good discussion around these sorts of ideas in the past few days, albeit from a more a technical perspective. See Ajit Jaokar’s thoughts and Tim O’Reilly’s response)

Knowledge Discovery
Social bookmarking is a tool that allows people to “tag” and share their bookmarks online. The tag associated with the bookmark is user-defined and helps classify the link. Tagging the link is not unlike placing it in a specific “Favorites” folder of a web browser, except that tags are generally much more specific and of course, the links are available via the Internet (see my social bookmarking profile). The most popular social bookmarking service to-date is Delicious, which was purchased by Yahoo! in December 2005.

Social Bookmarking, Enterprise Use, and Knowledge Discovery
IBM has an enterprise level social bookmarking tool called dogear. Geoff Harder previously reported that IBM employees created 17,000 links in a 2-3 month period.

How does this tie into knowledge discovery? Well, imagine HR using an employee’s social bookmarking profile to help place them into their next assignment. Or consider a manager reading an executive level summary of the types of links his employees are viewing.

Conclusion
Web 2.0 makes it easier to discover new knowledge. Social bookmarking is just one brief example of how that might occur. Information, data, and content (generally referred to as “knowledge”) are purposefully made more accessible and community based.

IBM is definitely a leader in implementing an enterprise based solution for social bookmarking. But knowledge discovery might be as simple as discovering those star employees (“knowledge workers”) via what they are writing on their blogs or the contributions they’ve made on internal wikis.

As Web 2.0 continues to mature, knowledge discovery is going to be one of the more exciting areas to watch. Real time collaboration will be simplified. Managers will have the opportunity to be smarter and thus make better decisions. Of course, technology alone won’t enable that – it will only facilitate it.

Next time – Knowledge Sharing

Links:

• Yahoo! Makes a Delicious Acquisition
• IBM’s dogear
• Enterprise bookmarking