Social networking: KM and beyond
Vignette recently introduced the Vignette Community product line, which can be used in conjunction with Vignette Content Management 7.5 and Vignette Portal or, through APIs, with other ECM systems or portals. It incorporates social networking functions such as ratings, rankings and comments, and it will soon be adding blogs and wikis. Vignette Collaboration 7.2 already provides blogs, wikis and forums but is geared for internal rather than customer-facing applications.
"We want our users’ experience to be personal, social and pervasive," says Kirsten Knipp, senior product manager at Vignette. "They should be able to use whatever channel they want, see what they personally need to see, and easily share their knowledge and opinions with others."
CMS400.NET Web content management from Ektron supports social networking to allow creation of groups, and taxonomy support in its threaded discussions. IBM’s social networking product is Lotus Connection, and Microsoft has added it through SharePoint. Alfresco, which offers an open source ECM product, has taken the approach of integrating its product with Web 2.0 tools and services such as Facebook, iGoogle, MediaWiki, and TypePad, among others.
In its Magic Quadrant study on team collaboration and social software, Gartner indicates that no software product has attained "leadership" status. Nearly all of the products fall into the "niche" category, but they do not necessarily occupy the same niche. They represent a wide mix of both functionality and maturity. Gartner foresees consolidation as some companies become unable to compete in this crowded field. Those that remain are likely to have a broader but similar range of capabilities.
Beyond organizational borders
The fact that contributing to blogs and wikis is often voluntary has a lot to do with their success. "Human nature is inclined toward sharing," says Barry Libert, founder and chairman of Mzinga, "but the top-down, rigid nature of KM systems discouraged contribution. It was antithetical to the way people want to interact."
Libert, who co-authored We Are Smarter Than Me, successfully synthesized the input from thousands of individuals (including employees, customers, partners and investors) into a book on how to use the wisdom of crowds to improve business performance.
Better software has made sharing information much easier and more interesting. With support for rich Internet applications (RIAs), today’s social networking software lets people upload not just comments and documents, but pictures, video clips and sound bites. Moreover, next-generation workers are not only accepting but also demanding improved interactivity, comparable to what they use every day in their private lives. And employees of all ages are faced with a new environment, no longer expecting to work with a single company or even in a single profession. They need to establish and develop relationships much more quickly than in the past to sustain a lifetime of career change.
In addition to providing new avenues for information sharing, social networking can help create the much-needed relationships that, despite their digital basis, model in-person dynamics. After finding out from a blog that a contact in a community of practice has expertise in a particular area, for example, the next stop might be LinkedIn or Facebook, to find out more about the individual—see a photo, discover the person’s hobbies, read about past experiences. Those more personal insights allow an easier transition from stranger to colleague.