Unlike a manufacturing worker a knowledge worker typically perform many parallel responsibilities and tasks. Besides regular duties and activities within their own Unit they frequently play different roles in business processes and projects across the Value / Supply Chain, and participates in various innovation and improvement processes. On top of this they often attend various internal and external forums and groups to maintain and further develop their professional competencies and professional social networks.
The most important issue is the need for a cultural change and a common mindset of sharing Information, Knowledge and Connections - Connect > Collaborate > Innovate.
To promote this way of thinking management has to engage employees throughout the organization to develop a culture of Network building, Team Collaboration and Open Innovation, and have a clear executive commitment to follow up on this culture change.
The Social Intranet
The mindset of the Social Intranet is to put People in the centre instead of the formal Information system. Which information and knowledge do I need to perform my roles in different business processes and formal projects, and how can I contribute to the continual business improvement process?
The following text is from a white paper about the Social Intranet.
The phrase social intranet has only appeared in recent months (late 2009) to describe an intranet with social media features. Although with any emerging technology there is likely to be disagreement on the precise definition of a new term, Toby Ward describe a social intranet as the following:
An intranet that features multiple social media tools for most or all employees to use as collaboration vehicles for sharing knowledge with other employees. A social intranet may feature blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking, or a combination of these or any other Web 2.0 (intranet 2.0) tool with at least some or limited exposure (optional) from the main intranet or portal home page.
However, a few employee or executive blogs do not make a social intranet. A social intranet requires wide participation, or at minimum, opportunity for participation, by most or all employees that have intranet access. Social intranets require social media: blogs, wikis, and user comments, to name a few. More advanced social intranets may incorporate multimedia, user-tagging, and social networking that are integrated into multiple channels including user profiles (such as the feature set produced by Microsoft SharePoint 2010 or Lotus Connections).
Social intranet basics:- Multiple social media tools
- Open opportunity to use social media tools for most or all employees with intranet access
- Access to social media tools from the intranet home page
Social media on the intranet is a relatively new phenomena having only appeared behind the firewall in the past 3 or 4 years (with the exception of instant messaging and discussion forums which have been around, in some form, since the late 1990s). In the past year or two, social media on the corporate intranet have become mainstream with up to two-thirds of organizations in the western world having some form of social media on their intranet.
Team Collaboration
The daily work of a Knowledge Worker is to collaborate with other people having a role in different teams to execute various tasks in business processes, formal projects and forum groups - decreed or as a volunteer. Using the new generation of web based collaboration solutions and tools can increase the interaction and efficiency of the company within and across those team categories.
Open Innovation
The phrase Open Innovation is is a term invented by Henry Chesbrough. Remember that open innovation is not only about creating great ideas for developing new Business Solutions, Products and Services. It's also about ideas regarding cost reductions and continuous improvements of customer services, internal processes and items in the knowledge/quality system etc.
Executive commitment to follow up on the culture change
One example of promoting this new cuture is the "top influencers" mechanism used by LinkedIn Groups.
Many of Nets employees are now using http://www.linkedin.com/ accounts as a Social Collaboration network within Nets while others are using Facebook to get in touch with colleagues.
Our new Social Intranet should have the same kind of functionality, where we can join forum groups and look up or follow our colleagues to see their position, functions, skills, interests etc.
There is a paradox that we today can find a lot more information about our colleagues on LinkedIn (and Facebook) than within the internal company information system...
