07 Feb
Lee Bryant is the co-founder of POST*SHIFT. As a recognized thought leader in digital transformation and collaboration, he produces regular content around innovation, learning and technology. His latest article Turning Noise into Knowledge provides deep insights on knowledge curation possibilities, here are the highlights.
Digital workplace tools are evolving and the rise of Slack is boosting competition around enterprise communication platforms. However, despite the plentiful offer, finding the appropriate tool for the teams or organization can be a challenging task.
Lee Bryant shares a valuable framework to support companies in their digital transformation for more efficient collaboration. By looking at the level of intimacy and scale between individuals or teams, qualify the collaboration speed within the different part of the organization, separate use cases and their matching platform types can be associated.
Within an organization, there are usually 3 levels of intimacy and scale when collaboration takes place between individuals:
- The small team (10-20 people)
- The department (100-1000 people)
- The firm (1000’s people)
Within those levels of intimacy, collaboration can be done at 3 different speed levels:
- Synchronous (the information sharing is immediate)
- Semi synchronous (content evolves over time)
- Asynchronous (key pieces of knowledge revised rarely)
Mapping the levels of intimacy with the collaborating speeds leads to 3 key use cases
- Real time collaboration among small teams: chat tools
- Department-level coordination of project space, communities and networks: enterprise social networks and wikis
- Firm-wide sharing and signalling: social intranet and enterprise social networks
The emerging opportunity here is to turn the unstructured content from ephemeral chat into more permanent actionable knowledge that can be communicated and shared to wider groups. Part of it will in time be done by AI or cognitive computing method but most of it can be done through regular content curation.
According to Lee Bryant: “Platforms like elium (…) have remained focused on knowledge curation and concrete use cases such as market intelligence, innovation and research since their early days as Knowledge Plaza. Whilst the platform has added collaboration, social networking and sharing features over the years, what they do best is provide a great experience for knowledge curation. (…) Their clients place (great value) on well-curated and effectively-communicated knowledge within their organisations.
Their new release doubles down on this value proposition with a super-simple unified content format for stories combined with fine-grained faceted search and targeted sharing features. If they continue to improve their integrations with tools like Slack and (perhaps more importantly in the enterprise) Microsoft Teams and Office 365, then there is certainly a space – and a need – for a knowledge curation platform such as elium somewhere between the ephemera of unstructured micro-content and the rolling plains of the company-wide ESN or social intranet.”
Turning content into knowledge, and conversation into learning, becomes more important as online engagement in the digital workplace increases. The organisation ability to foster learning communities will be decisive to enable knowledge curation. The right sharing platform makes it easy to find, collate and curate engaging content, leading to a more efficient knowledge-centric organization.
Read the original article from Lee
