Organisations are now producing unprecedented amounts of information.
Better managing of this information and knowledge has always been a strategic initiative for many. The volume of data has created an urgent and growing need to manage information effectively so it contributes to improved efficiency, optimised business processes, compliance and overall competitiveness. Rise of powerful consumers has placed Digital Transformation and adoption as the highest priority agenda for most organisations.
While a Document Management System helps organise the unstructured information by providing a platform for the users to easily access and search information, the biggest challenge that remains is to identify effective channels for convenient information sharing leveraging the documented and non-documented information across the organisation and ensuring that the information available is usable & useful.
In person communication and relationship based information sharing has always been on the top of the list when it comes to active collaboration. Informal Social Networks always existed but were usually hidden and independent of technology. Increase in remote working and distributed workforce calls for use of technology based social tools to timely share information. Organisations today are considering Enterprise Social Network (ESN) tools to better leverage the internal knowledge so as to support collaborative working and productivity initiatives.
A research conducted by Cambridge Mass based Forrester Research Inc. has reported that only 12% of information workers have access to Enterprise Social Network (ESN) technology and just 8% of them use ESN at least once a week. Organisations have to consider their real need for ESN and also to ensure that the user community understands – “What’s in it for me”.
There are variety of features, tools & third party products that provide Enterprise Social and organisations can carefully choose the ones that suits the most to their style, culture and values. It’s also important to define appropriate metrics and define governance and monitoring process. Here is how ESN can assist with improving knowledge culture –
- Connected Information Community
- Empower your users with a greater sense of involvement by bringing people and information together and creating social information hubs/groups aligned with your business structure
- Give your people a platform to share their experiences and encourage them to make a difference improving cross boundary communication
- Better engage your users by quickly floating key information and documents across the group(s) supporting active collaboration and information flow
- Allow securely sharing information with your external suppliers and partners
- Information Relevance and availability
- Surprise your users by providing them with contextual information relevant to their job while still controlling appropriate information security. This guided discovery will eliminate time spent on searching and retrieving information.
- Leverage intelligent feeds that allows your users to have insights on key projects/work/information across the company. This helps reducing unnecessary emails and over communication.
- Socially Connected colleagues
- FastTrack business processes (e.g.employee on-boarding) and attract young talent
- People form the most valuable asset for any organisation. Connect with your colleagues and quickly know their skills and expertise
- Support Real time communication with employees across geographic boundaries using Enterprise communicator.
- Conduct remote meetings and discussions with large group of people and enable virtual teams
- Connect the top to the bottom and make management team more accessible hence developing a robust culture based on trust.
- Easily share documents and information
- Capture conversations on a document by allowing your users to directly chat in context of a document
- Co-author documents in real time. Now that’s true collaboration
- Share screens and allow users to better work together
- Streamline business processes by introducing the social element
- Improve your knowledge culture
- Recognise the knowledge sharing within your organisation by appropriate encouragement. Award Social badges to collaborators and knowledge sharing individuals.
- Reflect the recognition as part of their KPI’s
- Develop appropriate governance framework with communities of Practice(CoP) supporting your knowledge culture
- Monitor and analyse your organisations Knowledge Trends and listen to you users voice to take constructive actions
Microsoft has recently released Office 2016 putting emphasis on Social mobility. This along with SharePoint, Office 365 productivity tools (including Yammer) and various third party products will be creating a massive improvement in the knowledge management initiatives.
Gartner recognizes Microsoft as a Leader in the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace for seven years running! https://lnkd.in/b6YNA6K
Adoption and Change Management still remains at the core so as to successfully roll out social technologies.
“The greatest difficulty lies not in persuading people to accept new ideas, but in persuading them to abandon old ones.” John Maynard Keynes
About Prometix: Prometix work with our clients to establish a structure that makes information easier to create, store, find and share with others. We’ve worked hard to understand how people want to access and share information.
For more information on our success stories please feel free to call us on (02) 8072 0666 or email enquiries@prometix.com.au
