Social Knowledge versus Business Networking

More and more businesses are assertively working on using "social networks" to try to move the business operations to a more "advanced", and at least more agile, stance.

We would say that "Social Networks" are something whose time has come. And this would be true due in no small part to the acceptance that business really does run fundamentally in and on an "Information Economy" -- with social networks being a dazzling opportunity to easily generate and acquire information heretofore untapped or even orphaned in time and place. In short, what is sought is an infusion of Social Knowledge into Business Networking, and "social network" actually becomes a handy abbreviation.

No wonder that the phrase "Social Network" has special meaning to a large business.

But in reality, businesses have a funny way of not worrying about the "special meaning" of something, and instead grasping and acting on the "convenient use" of something. Convenience is sometimes pleasant but often unruly, which, in business lingo, probably means counter-productive.

If everyone keeps their head on straight, then there will be agreement that "a Network becomes a Medium for Communication of Information that may be Shared in the Production or Distribution of Knowledge"... With all the capitalized moving parts in that description, a few questions arise. For example: did the business actually "capitalize" (i.e., fund) all the parts (on its own or through partners)? Is the "connectivity" of the Network to the Production or Distribution being managed? What if anything is being done to transform Communication coincidences or Information coincidences into Shares? And does the business acknowledge that each moving part already carries a legacy of "administration" that is different from the other parts? Does it acknowledge that applying a "social" aspect to any of the parts requires both control and flexibility (i.e., policy)?

In the last four companies I've worked at (present included), none has actually licked the problem because the effort to cover these bases is huge and in fact there has been no "chief knowledge officer" to lead and enforce what is really necessary to make these parts work together properly and sustainably: namely, Engineering!

Let's face it, the "culture" of social networking is emotionally averse to the idea of environmental engineering, because the culture is about finding the magic in organic evolution, and it thinks that engineering will work against it. This aversion results in having the sense that crafty opportunism, packaged as "innovation", "grass roots" and "collaboration" should be the strategy for growing the environment we want to call the Social Network. The problem is, of course, that making a Social Network into an actual Business Environment is the only way that a social network can be both valuably and practically leveraged by or integrated with a larger, legitimate, managed business environment. The goal of that would be to eliminate the most predominant problems of business (not workforce) adoption of social networks:
- information mistaken for knowledge
- expensive and unvetted redundancy both within and across different information and communications systems
- unreliable completeness of collections and conversations
- unaligned value judgments amongst frequent users vs. occasional users
- and unaligned value judgments among managers of the business vs. non-managers.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 11:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack