Do you speak wiki and blog?

Content management systems make it easier to share knowledge across an organization

One of the biggest concerns for training and development professionals is the ability to retain critical knowledge when employees leave an organization, according to a study by IBM and the American Society for Training and Development.

The aging workforce and the looming mass retirement of baby boomers have put this issue on the front burner, as cited by nearly 30 per cent of the 239 learning executives surveyed in 2006. However, less than half of the respondents in the study Closing the Generational Divide: Shifting Workforce Demographics and the Learning Function said their organizations have specifically addressed knowledge transfer as part of the overall learning strategy.

The growth of electronic information at work has created new problems when it comes to retaining and tracking information in an organization. The use of e-mail for business means key parts of the communication process are not committed to paper. That may save some trees, but it certainly puts pressure on a records-based function like HR.

One of the more troublesome technologies from a knowledge management perspective is instant messaging (IM). Industry studies suggest 70 per cent of employees use IM at work. Instant messages are typically full of short-hand and they don’t get saved in electronic files or folders.

According to the IBM study it appears companies are taking steps to pass on institutional knowledge, with one-half of organizations using document or knowledge repositories as tools to capture and preserve knowledge.

What does this have to do with HR professionals and business people? Knowledge management is both a functional and a technical problem. Organizations are faced with the dual challenge of optimizing their storage infrastructure while at the same time meeting the increasingly stringent business requirements placed on the stored information.

Most organizations want information to be shared, peer-to-peer, supervisor to subordinate, or vice-versa. Whether a performance appraisal between supervisor and employee, or a detailed document shared between a large project team, sending a document back and forth allows each person to improve the format and contents.

This collaboration is usually considered to be a good thing, but any time a document is shared between two or more people there is a potential problem in maintaining the integrity of the document. Managing collaboration content is particularly important with the introduction of regulations like Sarbanes Oxley — an American law with a huge impact in Canada. Online content management systems (CMS), such as blogs and wikis, support the creation, management, distribution, publishing and retrieval of information.

A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in chronological order.

Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics or local news and some function as personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images and links. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of most early blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting) and are part of a wider network of social media.

Blogs can be internal within an organization but are much more common in the public domain. As of November 2006 the blog search engine Technorati was tracking nearly 60 million blogs.

Perhaps the best known CMS is a wiki, a special type of website that makes collaboration easy. The difference between a blog and a wiki is that blogs have sequential commentary, one after the other, while wikis allow full change and version capability. Like blogs, a wiki can be public or private. The best known public wiki is the massive online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia collaboratively written by many of its readers. Many people are constantly improving it, making thousands of changes an hour. Inappropriate changes are usually removed quickly and repeat offenders can be blocked from editing.

A wiki is not a single unique tool, it is a type of tool. That is, there are many different commercial wiki tools (Atom, Bubbler Instant Publisher, EditMe, JournURL, KDE Wiki, OM1, Central Desktop and Google’s JotSpot) each offering its own version, properties and tools.

SharePoint, by Microsoft, is also a CMS, but doesn’t use wikis to manage collaborative applications. Instead, a wiki is a feature in the broader SharePoint collaborative suite. Users may create blogs within SharePoint as well. While SharePoint offers additional functionality, it also requires and uses Microsoft SQL Server or other MS tools sets.

At a basic level, Microsoft Word offers a basic type of content management. Two or more people can save a document to a common file server. In fact, in an attempt to reduce the risk of a laptop and its data going missing, many organizations dictate that documents must be saved on a designated server. In the case of a common server the security is usually offered by the IT group through access controls.

Word also offers “track changes” and “comments,” methods by which multiple users can see other’s comments and separate one person’s work from another’s while being able to see the entire integrated document.

Whether working with teams around the world or colleagues in the same building, the use of the right tools in the collaboration on content can be extremely efficient and effective. In addition, the use of these tools creates a warehouse of organizational knowledge, so whether a person works alone or on a project team, leaves the organization or changes roles, much of that person’s knowledge is available for everyone at the organization who needs it.

Ian Turnbull is managing partner of Laird & Greer HR Management Consultants in Toronto, specializing in HR, payroll, and time system selection and management. He is co-author of HRMS: A Practical Approach (3rd edition, Carswell). He can be reached at (877) 653-0422 or [email protected].

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