This is an article I’ve been working on drawn from client experiences and recent research into the areas of knowledge management leading to workforce integration and connected business strategy. Written for business leaders who are strategizing ways to leverage company knowledge, mitigate the risks of a retiring or transient workforce and build a more agile workplace this article discusses some key concepts to help with an approach.

I’ll break the article down into a multi-part posting… and I welcome your feedback…….

Know what knowledge sharing looks like

For many companies, it is the knowledge and expertise they possess in their chosen field that differentiates them from the competition. This competitive advantage allows them to profit. Yet a strategy for developing, harnessing and leveraging this knowledge is often missing or simply not carried out.

Recent thought has identified a set of four stages that a connected business should progress through, with the help of technology, as it relates to knowledge and information sharing activities.

As a connected business you know you’ve reached the first stage when your workers have the tools and knowhow to create their own media (e.g. Newsletter, video, online article), publish and distribute to the rest of the company. Referred to as User Generated Content, sharing knowledge starts with this being distributed to others within the company.

The second stage is Collaboration. This is when two or more workers are able to ‘labour’ together to produce something of value. The simplest form of collaboration is a conversation, one worker talking to another about a safety procedural change for example. If this conversation took place on a company discussion board then others have the ability to ‘listen’ and contribute to the conversation as well. In the example a third person joins the conversation and identifies a gap in the procedural change. Now the three of them engage in co-creation, another form of collaboration, to re-design the safety procedure and close the gap.

The third stage is Community. A community is created by a group of workers coming together in support of a body of knowledge. By sharing their thoughts, insights and collaborative efforts the quality of knowledge and its distribution to all community members is improved. Technology facilitates the community and allows this sharing to take place over time and across space. Communities become more effective as they grow in size and strength (frequency of use).

The fourth stage is Collective Intelligence and it refers to the idea that meaningful results can be derived by performing analysis on the actions of workers during the process of collaborating in communities. Continuing from previous example, once the re-designed safety procedure is completed stored in a knowledge repository and available for all to access, technology tracks the action of workers retrieving this procedure and captures their feedback. Some analysis can then be performed to determine the effectiveness of the procedure and offer additional safety recommendations to workers who are looking to perform a similar task.

Next: Part Five: - Know what capabilities enable a Connected Business

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Gaurav Mishra  is CEO of social media research and strategy company 20:20 Social. Describing the evolution of knowledge sharing was derived from Gaurav’s work on social media. See his work here.  I found his framework to be very insightful.