Social Computing tools and Knowledge Management
It was in August 1997, when I met Jim Bair, Director of Qumana. Inc, when he taught a Summer Course in Syracuse University (NY). Some colleagues from Barcelona and I were passionate with his teachings on Knowledge Management, a very unknown discipline in our country.
Knowledge Management seemed to us something very theoretic and difficult to put it in figures. We learned about IT systems supporting knowledge management and we also learned the theories by Nonaka & Takeuchi, which have become a reference in KM.
Jim is really a very communicative person and was fantasticly representing the evolution of KM in the previous years. He explained how people reacted to the first e-mail systems implemented in a company. Most people found that the phone was easier to get in touch with other colleagues, but those using the e-mail realized that they could get easier to the directives of the company. They were never available on the phone, but they answered the messages on the e-mail. It was a sort of flattening the hierarchical structure of the company, facilitating information to flow easier.
In social networks, information is the fundamental token that people exchange and build the visible link between nodes. But information tends to flow in homogeneous networks. Our society is so strongly organized that hierarchical structures have still today a dramatic weight in peoples consciousness. The possibility to move outside our level or our circle is something that most of the people dream, but hardly achieve. The virtual world has made this possible, because users can change their identity and become the personality of their dreams. This is the avatar in Second Life. We feel in an homogeneous network when we interact with others on the Internet and this makes us more relaxed.
Today Jim told me about his new book Making Knowledge Work: Impact of Web 2.0. (Ark Group, 2007. 185 p., ISBN: 978-1-906355-09-8 (hkb)). It is a very useful book for those companies wanting to jump into the web 2.0. The book talks about the Enterprise 2.0 and how companies have to adapt to these tools.
