One of management’s greatest challenges is harnessing the full potential of their workforce to maximise productivity. Given the wealth of skills and knowledge that are possessed by employees, it is expedient to empower each individual and make their resources accessible to the whole organisation. Social technologies such as blogs and wikis provide tools which enable collaboration and information sharing among employees. However their deployment needs to be managed strategically in order to mitigate the associated risks.
The exponential growth in popularity of social networking sites such as MySpace and Blogger is producing a generation of young adults adept at sharing information in a format that is easy to access and understand. As they enter the workforce, businesses can harness their collaboration and communication skills by setting up a blogging system for individuals or teams. Blogs of activities, projects and problem resolutions create a knowledge resource that can be readily accessed in the absence of the employees concerned. Due to their less formal structure, blogs are simpler to set up and maintain than more rigid content management systems and thus employees would be keener to adopt them.
Similarly, the advent of Wikipedia has led to the growth of wikis as a popular tool for collaboration and knowledge sharing. Editable web pages can be updated by employees working jointly on a project or creating a knowledge base such as FAQs. A significant advantage of blogs and wikis is the reduction in the use of emails and file attachments, which can be unwieldy and create duplicate information.
However several IT and management policies need to be instituted before social technologies are deployed. A key challenge is the protection of the confidentiality of sensitive information. Clear policies need to be in place to guide the types of information that can be published on blogs and wikis while different levels of access need to be defined for viewing or editing such information. This also necessitates monitoring to ensure strict compliance with the policies.
There needs to be a robust quality control mechanism in order to maintain a high standard of accuracy and currency of information. While the collaborative use of blogs and wikis increase the likelihood of errors being detected and information kept up-to-date, team leaders or line managers need to take overall responsibility for the sites.
Employees might be less motivated to update the sites if it is perceived as an additional task. Conversely, they might be less efficient in their time management if they have to take time off their core tasks to update the sites. Thus the ideal implementation would be the integration of blogs and wikis into their workflow like other information systems.
The utility of social technologies is in their accessibility; hence careful thought should go into how information is stored as well as how it is retrieved. Blogs and wikis could be deployed in conjunction with enterprise search technologies which would index the information and speed up the retrieval of relevant results by searching for concepts rather than keywords.
