Complete Web Monitoring

Chapter 15. Internally Focused Communities

The communities and tools we’ve looked at so far face the public. Communities are flourishing within enterprises too, driven by a need to communicate freely and transparently with coworkers. Internal communities are a recent innovation in the field of knowledge management (KM). Ideally, KM lets organizations maximize their information resources and optimize collaboration.

That’s easier said than done. It’s hard to get employees to share what they know, since much of their knowledge is tacit, informal, and hard to extract. A significant amount of a company’s information assets is buried in email messages and attachments as unstructured data. Employees spend their time digging through inboxes and duplicating efforts; wisdom walks out the door every night.

Internal communities provide one way to change this. “KM 1.0” consisted of static intranets that were little more than a place to store information. Recently, however, organizations have realized that for KM to work well, it has to be integrated with the way people work, rather than a separate system that expects workers to change. By giving employees tools like chat, instant messaging, wikis, and forums, a company can make more of its inherent knowledge accessible in ways that employees adopt quickly, and that don’t require them to change how they behave.

The methods we’ve looked at for monitoring online communities also apply well to internal communities. There are some important differences, ...