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

LAUNCH: PROJECT OR INITIATIVE?

In my first book, Mastering Organizational Knowledge Management, I spent quite a bit of time discussing the difference of a project approach versus an initiative8 approach to get started with knowledge flow management.

Launching an ESN is a typical knowledge flow initiative, so most of what I discussed there holds true. The danger of looking at an ESN launch as a project is that, while it might get a good implementation at first, the long-term view is missing. Without this perspective all the cost and effort might be wasted. I can’t spell this out often enough: This is not only about technology! It is about people! In turn, you will need an ongoing strategy and initiative support. You will need to invest in community management and training that goes beyond technology to cover business use. You will need a team to monitor the ESN on a daily basis so they can steer and guide it to function at a level beyond just answering users’ technical questions. If you look at this with a project focus, you are only handling the first half of the game, and you are definitely risking the overall win.

Under the umbrella of a longer-term (multiyear) initiative you can run specific projects, of course—and one of those will likely be the launch of the ESN itself. Other typical projects under the initiative framework might include:

• Organizing an Innovation Day, where you collect ideas and later have a team evaluate those ideas and implement the best ones.
• An integration ...