Throughout this book, we have discussed how the Hyper-Social shift will affect each organization and its stakeholders in the areas of management thinking, marketing, the customer experience, sales, product development and innovation, talent management, and leadership. Although we have looked at nearly all of the important processes that can be Hyper-Socialized, we have omitted one key area: how organizations develop and share knowledge. Generally known as knowledge management, this organizational process not only will be affected by many of the changes we’ve discussed, but will optimally drive these changes further, and spread Hyper-Sociality throughout organizations.
We are well aware of the ongoing disputes about the function and structure of “knowledge management” as it was understood in the first decade of the twenty-first century; in the interests of not getting mired in the debate, we will use the term knowledge management to encompass the systems and practices that organizations use to capture, communicate, and leverage both explicit and tacit knowledge.
As we’ve noted elsewhere in this book, the one perfectly predictable future state of companies undergoing the Hyper-Social shift is that they will be absolutely inundated with conversations. These conversations are going to provide data, and also require data from disparate organizational functions, to create authentic, valuable, and engaging exchanges between customers, employees, and business partners. One person or even one team of people in marketing, for instance, will not be able to manage the knowledge flows that are going to begin, nor should it, as the knowledge is likely to have wider utility across the organization.
On the most basic level, the Hyper-Social shift will have a dramatic impact on all sorts of employee communication going forward. First, the Hyper-Social shift is an enabler of communication and knowledge sharing that couldn’t easily take place in the past. Top-down communication has always been easy for the corporation; communication upward has always been harder (and more filtered). Communication from side to side within the enterprise, or across silos and divisions, has been harder still. Yet because of the massive platform for participation that social applications present, a rich dialogue can now take place with equal ease across all organizational dimensions.
This communication pays off in many ways that are not obvious. First, knowledge sharing and customer service increase when people can identify fellow human resources and access them in real time. Companies like Best Buy have discovered that employees can create powerful tools like prediction markets by leveraging the communication tools and the social nature of their coworkers. Other Best Buy employees have created idea-evaluation tools that permit coworkers to vote on new ideas and suggest their own.
Enhanced communication has other critical impacts, though, in addition to improved customer service, better business analytics, and improved knowledge sharing. Another key outcome is the sharing and reinforcing of the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that define a company’s culture. This culture-shaping role, which it is often the responsibility of people at the top of the organization to communicate downward, can now be reinforced through a multitude of touch points between the employees and their coworkers every day.
To succeed in satisfying the Four Pillars of Hyper-Sociality, companies are going to need to scale up their knowledge-sharing and information-processing systems dramatically. In order to deal with the messiness of speaking out in the open with customers, partners, and detractors, organizations are going to need to understand in real time, and across silos, functions, and geographies, what the tribe is talking about, asking for, and suggesting. Given the breakdown and/or blurring of the formal communication channels that existed prior to Hyper-Sociality, the organization will find itself needing knowledge about customers and products outside of the usual contexts, and then conversing with them in a way that is up-to-date and authentic, and geared more toward the tribe’s interests than the company’s.
To be truly human-centric, organizations are going to need to know their customers or business partners intimately, and to be held to the standard of fairness and authenticity that humans expect every time. And to be really tribe-sensitive, the company is going to be expected to understand the tribal context for each customer. It won’t be enough to know that the customer is a 40-year-old male who has ordered from your company before. The organization will be expected to have a social CRM system in effect: to know that the customer is also a respected member of an important software development group, and that he has strong views on open-source software, for instance, that he blogs about frequently.
Implementing new information technology systems to provide the infrastructure needed to engage in Hyper-Social conversations with stakeholders will probably be the instinctive corporate response. If the organization doesn’t add a social layer to every aspect of this system, however, it is likely to fail. This has been the Achilles’ heel of technology-enabled knowledge management systems for decades. They typically were designed by nonusers; were rigid in their taxonomy and functions; were geared not to human use, but rather to corporate goals; and didn’t match any of the Human 1.0 behaviors we’ve seen. All too often, knowledge management systems were created with a predetermined and inflexible view of how information should flow within the organization, where it should be created, and who should have access to it. Human 1.0 principles, like the tendency of people to help one another, to seek status in the eyes of their tribe, and to accurately determine which information is really useful, were ignored, to the detriment of the organization that could be using that squandered knowledge.
Some companies are now moving in the right direction, however. IBM, for instance, has dramatically altered its legacy knowledge management technology and approach. As Bryant Clevenger, global leader for the IBM Global Business Services knowledge strategy, states:
We undertook a massive overhaul of the technology and approach we use for knowledge management, moving from a centrally managed, linear, taxonomy- and repository-based system to one that leverages the best of Web 2.0, including social software, user participation, and key market-driven concepts like sponsored links. We see this as a shift from “knowledge management” to “knowledge sharing.”1
Best Buy has adopted a more user-driven open collaboration and knowledge-sharing infrastructure as well, one that appears to be very different from what most would call a traditional knowledge management system:
We have 150,000 employees in the field; the best ideas are going to come from people close to the customer. So we’ve been working hard at moving from a top-down hierarchical organization to one that’s much flatter, an organization that plans their bottoms up and tops down.
We also have a tool called the Water Cooler, which enables conversations on topics around the company to happen organically. It’s business focused and there can be chats, our COO has chats all the time on the Water Cooler.
We have something called The Loop, which is, if you’re not familiar with Red Dragon, a capability where people put ideas on The Loop and other people can vote on the ideas and improve the idea. People can also invest in the ideas and then the best ideas essentially are highlighted and emerge and move forward.
Another tool we have is called Prediction Markets which is sort of a stock market for ideas, everybody is given fictitious money when they participate and they trade stocks that are about ideas—how many gift cards are we selling a month, will our Geek Squad warranty product be successful, will we open a store in China by a certain date. And what that’s intended to do is flush information out that may be in the system that people don’t know about. Somebody who is working on the China opening at a mid-level of the company might have a good insight, for instance.
And then lastly, we have something called Blue Shirt Nation, which was formed; it was the first of our tools. Two guys in the company ... they built this in their basements, a social website like MySpace, where Blue Shirts, what we call our employees, could go and talk about whatever they want to talk about. That initiative was not company sponsored. Over time they were able to get additional funding and add features and essentially lots of different kinds of topics are out there but they don’t have to be business related. That is the difference from the Water Cooler tool, which is very business related.
So you see we have a number of different tools. Collaboration and transparency are key elements of creating better work and part of how we think we’ll build better trust both with employees and with consumers.2
Best Buy’s less structured, user-driven knowledge-sharing platforms are intriguing and instructive for a number of reasons. First, we see the users defining the specifications and building and then adopting the tools they need to do their jobs better. The organization accepts the cocreation with its employees and provides funding, but there is little other overt control. There are no hierarchical delineations—people at all levels appear to be engaged in creating and using the tools. People are not participating or contributing because they are being told to; they are participating because it is rewarding. The rewards are the Human 1.0 sort that we’ve seen elsewhere—people enjoy the status of being smart, like helping others, and are developing their customer-serving skills. In addition, they are probably reciprocating the favors and goodwill that they receive regularly from their colleagues.
And since the users have helped to design and construct the tools, the likelihood of their adopting them is far higher than in the conventional case, where knowledge management tools are thrust upon an unsuspecting user base. Also, given the fact they these tools are very social, they will be familiar, and similar to the tools that the employees probably use on their days off.
Researchers looking at online communities have begun to ascribe value to lurkers, those people who observe conversations or access information, but typically do not actually participate or contribute. These researchers’ insights, drawn from Hyper-Social communities, are providing new perspectives that indicate that these lurkers might actually provide great value as disseminators of the knowledge that they pull from the community. Tellingly, legacy knowledge management systems would probably view lurkers as freeloaders who are of little value to the organization; looking at them through the Hyper-Social lens, however, it can be seen that they are valuable members of the knowledge community, and probably pollinators of information beyond the formal community.3
So where does the Hyper-Social shift take knowledge management? Probably it will take it to the wider acquisition and sharing of information, as opposed to the management of it. Building on our learnings from earlier chapters, Knowledge Management 2.0 will allow the people closest to the information to decide what needs to be captured, what is valuable, and what is missing that needs to be captured going forward. Messiness will be accepted, and top-down processes will be minimized. Knowledge management users not only should be allowed to cocreate the information that is fed into the system, but also should be collaborators who decide how the knowledge-sharing process should work, and how it needs to change to be more valuable.
As Georg von Krogh and his collaborators note in their book Enabling Knowledge Creation: How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge and Release the Power of Innovation,
Restricting the knowledge-worker category to certain types of professional employees will stifle a company’s capacity to unleash the full potential of its human resources. Knowledge creation might occur in the close interaction between an untrained salesperson and a new customer, for example, or when a service technician together with his team finds a new solution for manufacturing a product, or a young assistant with a computer hobby might propose new ways to present the company on the World Wide Web. In other words, knowledge work is a human condition, not a privileged one.4
Others have commented that it’s a rare company that understands the importance of “informal improvisation”—let alone respects it as a legitimate business activity. John Seely Brown, an author and the former director of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, notes, “Innovation is everywhere, the problem is learning from it.”5 Few companies currently know how to learn from this so-called local innovation, but Hyper-Socialized knowledge management can remedy this problem to a large degree. Capturing this informal improvisation is often not even on the radar screens of the people who structure conventional knowledge management systems. A social system needs to have the flexibility to capture these improvisations and make them useful to others who are trying to crack the same nut. Although it may seem radical from a conventional knowledge management perspective, something as simple as an unstructured wiki that provides a repository for such improvisations clearly goes a long way toward enabling learning from them.
On a similar note, there are likely to be knowledge flows that are not being captured today, but that, if captured, would provide significant value to the organization and its customers. For instance, conventional CRM systems capture a wealth of data about known customers through their direct touch points with the organization (i.e., orders, calls for help, complaints, and delivery information). As we discussed earlier, however, equally important customer touch points are occurring in social media, where customers are discussing your products with their tribe, writing product reviews, listening to other users’ comments, or seeing a competitor’s advertisement. The bulk of these incredibly useful touch points are not being captured because there is no present knowledge of them or interest in capturing them on the organization’s part. Shouldn’t we be capturing these insights in a knowledge flow somewhere? Giving the front-line employees in the same online communities a knowledge management system that is plastic enough to be altered so that it can capture this knowledge would clearly provide great value to both the employee and the company, as well as the customer. And since such a system would provide value to all parties (customer, employee, and organization alike), it would have a much higher likelihood of being used.
Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, says that because data are now free and ubiquitous, the scarce factor “is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it”6–so much so, that Varian says that the “sexy job” of the next 10 years is going to be statisticians. While we might object to that characterization of statistics, we agree with Varian’s highlighting of the importance of analysis, or creating knowledge from the increasing amounts of data that are being created. Opening up information-gathering processes to more participants and cocreators, which is what Hyper-Socialization does, will only exacerbate this torrent of information that needs to be converted into knowledge.
A quick and dirty substitute for such data analysis may be the much less precise analysis at which the human brain excels, augmented by simple technologies. For instance, “social Q&A” systems are likely to become increasingly important and popular, as they deliver knowledge, remember queries, act asynchronously, and tap into users’ sociality. Social Q&A tools are probably as powerful as they are because they are so humanlike. The software mimics the way many humans seek an answer—no Boolean logic is required. Users articulate their lack of knowledge in terms that they know will be familiar to others with an equal or greater degree of knowledge in that area (“Does our Product X work with Product Y from Competitor Z?”) and then trust that human reciprocity will prompt someone to provide them with insight. Like a human, the social Q&A tool will remember queries that were asked in the past, and when similar queries or answers arise, it will link these individuals to a tribe of people who are obviously interested in the same topic. Social Q&A tools accomplish a valuable aspect of knowledge sharing: turning potential ties between problem solvers into actual ties.
Notwithstanding the obvious benefits of making knowledge management Hyper-Social, we appear to be early in the migration, and companies are likely to raise a number of objections to Hyper-Socializing knowledge management. Organizations have balked, for instance, at improving knowledge-sharing tools for fear of creating legal liability or making litigation discovery easier for adversaries. Others have resisted opening up knowledge management systems to wider participation for fear that information will leak outside of the organization.
Since knowledge management’s functionality and features will be driven by humans who are trying to engage with and satisfy other humans, it is likely that legacy firewalls surrounding information will fall. Most organizations have walled off critical CRM information, pricing, and profitability information from employees in areas such as customer care or product development. It is wholly likely and logical that some day in the Hyper-Social future, the humans in customer care or product development will speak with or cocreate with these customers, and that knowing more about a specific customer will be critical to interacting most effectively with that individual. Formerly restricted “need to know” information will now have a wider group of employees (and perhaps business partners) who need to pull from it.
Management’s guidance and messaging on how important knowledge sharing is, and its proper use, should be explicit. Rather than mandating knowledge sharing or tying it to compensation, leadership should consider what needs to be done to knowledge management to create user “pull” instead of managerial “push.” It is also likely, given the Hyper-Social shift, that knowledge management will eventually open up the walls to people who were formerly “outsiders” and not considered part of the conventional knowledge management user base. Based on an observation by Beth Comstock, global CMO of GE, we may already be there:
I think marketers’ next hurdle is a knowledge management one—where we have to figure out how you start to harness the data that exists so that you know your customer better than they know themselves and so that you can understand and intuit and feed them back data that’s going to make them even smarter. I think it’s an opportunity for marketers to ask, “How do we then increase that knowledge and help our customers make smart decisions and help them go after their performance?” So, I think that’s the way we’re seeing customers starting to change, that they have more of an appetite for data and we have access to more data connected to what we offer.7
In effect, hasn’t SAP’s Developer Network become an externalized knowledge management system as well, where critical product information is shared between the company and the users? Indeed, SAP is leveraging Hyper-Sociality to improve its problem solving and knowledge sharing, goals that are squarely in the province of traditional knowledge management.
Management must not lose sight of the fact that talent will increasingly have access to unprecedented amounts of information from the world outside of the organization. What will management do to ensure that this external information and insight will be visible to the right people in the organization, and be used in tandem with organizational information in the best and highest fashion? Although this indicates the need for improved information systems, employee training on both data parsing and knowledge sharing is likely to be required, as is a fundamental reconsideration of why and how people share knowledge within the organization. Applying Hyper-Sociality may well be a large part of the solution.
Increasing Hyper-Sociality within an organization will drive both the creation of new knowledge about customers and products and the need for new knowledge management tools and policies. Organizations that harness Human 1.0 traits (like reciprocity and the desire to look smart in front of our tribes) effectively, and that put user needs before rigid organizational policies, will create powerful, sustainable new ways for the company to better serve its customers.
Many organizations are still a long way from Hyper-Socializing their knowledge management systems and policies, however. Are your organization’s knowledge management systems rigid, or are they flexible in terms of where knowledge should come from or who should have access to it? Do your knowledge management systems capture local innovation effectively and share it more broadly across your organization? Is your organization leaving critical knowledge about customers, competitors, and products on the table because the system is not configured to capture that knowledge? Is your organization still trying to figure out how to persuade people to use, or contribute to, your present knowledge management system? Would your organization ever consider opening up internal knowledge management systems to business partners or customers? Your answers to these questions will help you to begin assessing how Hyper-Social your knowledge management is, and what you can do to improve it.