L&D 2020: Shaping change in learning
Technology
Social networks and collaboration
The ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ – an established 21st-century business concept – has rapidly escalated across organisations in search of innovation. The earlier examples set by Linux, Wikipedia, YouTube, Second Life, Google and eBay have been added to regularly even by mature businesses. This new modus operandi revolves around four powerful ideas: openness, peer groups, sharing and acting globally1.
Individuals are generating their own online content, bombarding each other with a mass of information, which users categorise through social tagging2, 3, 4 – a fast online search tool. Tagging enables people to form networks around specific interests, share resources and find new insights by discovering what other people think.
Social networking in a corporate environment continues to grow, particularly in organisations where the majority of staff work off-site – from home or customer locations. Staff visiting online corporate forums now use social tagging as the norm. This facility enhances corporate search engine capability to draw associations between people and concepts.
Companies have enhanced corporate social networking by creating internal versions of external social tagging sites, such as the old facebook4. Staff can easily access the details, blogs, wiki participation and interests of individual employees and other corporate stakeholders. Clicking on an individual’s name either creates an instant message or allows the user to view the individual’s tags. These systems incorporate other social networking tools, such as Google maps, which show where colleagues are physically located.
E-communities are bridging time zones and distance, making it easy to meet people with specific expertise. For example, a production engineer in Hull with a problem at 3 AM can easily get help from another engineer in Silicon Valley, Bangalore or Shanghai. Corporate wikis are used routinely for collaboration and contribute to corporate conversations that share knowledge, innovate and find solutions.
To thrive in a social computing era, companies are recognising the need to move away from traditional leadership styles and partner with employees and other stakeholders through dynamic online communities.
Informal leadership through blogging complements formal positional leadership and shifts traditional powerbases. Employees are keen to read the blogs of people with an interesting perspective whoever they may be. Operating in a more collaborative way, several organisations regularly create massive online ‘jams’ – events running over 48 to 72 hours – to discuss focused topics, for example company values or client solutions.
1. http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/feb2007/id20070201_774736.htm?chan=innovation_special+report+--+the+businessweek+wikinomics+series_the+businessweek+wikinomics+series Business Week, 02/07
2. http://www.flickr.com – upload and tag photos
3. http://www.technorati.com – compiles blog posts and other content. Tagging here is so valuable that the site began has selling advertising with proximity to popular tags
4. http://www.facebook.com – supports social networking between friends. Users upload photos, notes and news, and tag friends and associates
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