Connecting Organizational Silos: Taking Knowledge Flow Management to the Next Level with Social Media

Preface

It was April 2011 and the day after I spoke to a group of MBA students, professors, the dean, and some local business representatives at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was going to lunch with my friend and host at Queens, Professor Will Sparks. We started reflecting on the night before. It hadn’t really been a presentation to be exact—it was more a conversation on stage with questions from Will and the audience.

We had agreed beforehand on a few general topics (mostly from my first book, Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow), but just before we went into the lecture hall to take our seats on stage, I told Will that I was excited to see one of my latest activities, a recently launched internal social network, taking off with great success. During the talk (they call these events “Leadership in Action” at Queens) at about halftime, Will directed the conversation to what I saw as the next stage of knowledge flow management at SAS. And the audience that had been alert all along suddenly became really active, shooting a range of great questions not only about what we had done, what worked, and what presented challenges, but also about social media in general and how to deal with it on a personal level.

At our lunch the next day, Will suddenly said to me: “You should write another book about this. Many organizations are struggling with it, just like they are struggling with getting their knowledge to flow in general.”

Since I was still focused on the first ...