Social Software: The Rebirth of Knowledge Management

Even during its heyday during the late 1990’s, knowledge management software received a lot of criticism.  Huge upfront expenses, the ongoing need for expensive domain experts and an extremely hard to quantify ROI doomed most of these initiatives from the start.  That being said, the goals of knowledge management – to uncover and share information throughout the enterprise – were valid then and remain critical priorities for knowledge-based organizations.

The recent emergence of “social software” provides a roadmap to a new and improved world of knowledge management.  As mentioned in our “Trends and Predictions for 2006” post, the ubiquity and ease of use of the new social software applications position them to fill the gap in the KM and collaborative software market.

Recently, I’ve begun to use Jotspot, a wiki-in-a-box, to develop an intranet for sharing product information within Alacra.  The intranet includes pages for each product, along with market analyses, links to relevant articles and white papers and an overview of the competitive landscape.  This has been an invaluable tool for managing and sharing information for our newest product, Alacra Compliance, focused on the anti-money laundering market.

Jotspot is a hosted solution, providing a framework and tools for quickly developing a wiki.  I’ve used Jotspot to create an Intranet, but it could easily be used for project management, customer support or various collaborative applications.

As compared with traditional software-based KM applications, the benefits of using a wiki are pretty clear:

• There’s no upfront investment in software
• There’s no development or integration required
• Ease of use makes wikis perfect for workgroups or departments, where productivity is much easier to achieve than in an enterprise-wide solution
• Rather than centralizing the process with domain experts, all your end users can update their own information
• You’re up and running in few days, not months or years.

This last point is probably the most critical.  By getting your wiki up and running in a few days, you can begin showing immediate benefits to your users.  Once the users see value, they will begin to participate in the process, making the wiki a self-sustaining application.

Users in the enterprise have begun to accept the concept of a wiki, largely through use of Wikipedia as an information resource, but also through the emergence of vertical wikis like the Alacra Wiki.  Solutions from Jotspot, Socialtext and Zimbra will begin to drive wiki and collaborative usage throughout the enterprise.

(Posted by Barry Graubart, VP of Product Management, Alacra, Inc.)