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

GET ALL STAKEHOLDERS INVOLVED EARLY

A social media platform provides especially high value if it is used organization-wide—if really everyone in the organization can participate. That doesn’t mean that all will and must. There will be a certain number of people who will provide content (often not more than a small percent of the total staff), and others who will read content or follow discussions. The goal should be to have diversity and to get ideas and input from all departments and corners of the organization, even if only a subset in each of those corners participates.

Different parts of the organization (different divisions, functions, or geographic units) will have a different view of what the enterprise social media (ESN) platform should provide them with, and some will still be not convinced it is a good thing in the first place. There will be fears of losing control, of distraction from “real work,” and many other reasons why introducing something like an “internal Facebook” may be a bad idea. I will be discussing some of those fears in Chapter 6.

So what is the best way to get a successful platform running in spite of different positions? One important element of preparation is to start with a requirements-gathering phase that involves representatives from every part of the organization that might have a stake in an ESN. Requirements-gathering is a very important phase, but it often gets pushed aside or done incompletely, as there might be a preconception of what the ...