 Printer EmailWith this book in your hand, you’re probably looking for ways to help your organization get smarter by making the most effective use of online conversations. In these pages we write about a basic human drive to share what we know. We reposition that age-old practice at the intersection of two social environments: the modernizing organization and the expanding electronic network. Your company should know what this book reveals, because in this competitive and downsized economy, you are being forced to make the best use of your current human resource assets. You can’t afford the high cost of replacing the knowledge of people you’ve trained and lost. You must find, harvest, and distribute current and relevant knowledge from a wide variety of trusted human sources in order to make decisions and innovations in today’s hyperactive marketplace of things and ideas. Organizations today must change intelligently and constantly to survive. Ongoing, high-quality conversation is a key to making that kind of change possible. Though online knowledge networks can involve sophisticated technology, this book is not, at its core, about technology; it’s more about people and motivation. Though terms like application integration are important to understand in this context, you’ll likely find terms like cultural evolution and self-governing systems to be more relevant to the successful adoption of useful online conversation as a productive process within your organization. Even companies that value their knowledge networks can run into problems applying what they’ve learned to their business. There is a gap between knowing and doing. Putting conversation to work means bringing the right people with the requisite knowledge together and having their online interaction solve real and immediate problems. To reach that level of practical impact, there must be trust and commitment among the participants in addition to software and connectivity. For your organization, that means leading and fostering the kind of culture that motivates people to share what they know with their coworkers. If there’s a central theme to this book, it’s the importance of making the appropriate match between the culture and the technology for any given situation. The cultural needs may pertain to your entire organization, specific teams within your organization, or the constituents who are served by your organization. In our approach, culture is in the driver’s seat for selecting and configuring the technology, yet we also emphasize the inevitable influence of technology on the culture that uses it. Twenty years ago, very few people had seen, much less used, a computer. Now there are hundreds of millions of daily computer users. Today, relatively few people use online conversation as an essential work tool, but we see a future where the skills and practices we describe in this book are common throughout organizations, and where workers are engaged in multiple discussions from their desktops or laptops. In that future, workers will use the Net to share the fresh ideas and experiences that will help guide their companies. Building the Knowledge Management Network "Best Practices, Tools, and Techniques for Putting Conversation to Work"
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