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

SOCIAL SIDE OF KNOWLEDGE FLOWS

One day in February 2011, only a couple of weeks after launching The Hub,5 the SAS Enterprise Social Network, I was working from home and wanted to do some work via our virtual private network (VPN)—which is the way that we connect from a home computer to the SAS internal network—but when I started the VPN, it failed. The night before I had installed the latest release of the operating system from Apple (OS X) onto my iMac, and I suspected that had changed something.

Luckily, I had also brought my laptop home and that connected to the VPN just fine. But I wanted to resolve the problem, as I often prefer to leave my laptop in the office and use my personal iMac from home. At first I scanned the external web for a solution, but did not find anything about my specific issue. I tried a few tips that I found online, but none of them helped. Next, I sent a help desk request to our internal IT operation. And finally, I posted a question via the status box in my Hub profile, asking if anyone else had installed the new Apple OS X and found a way to get the VPN working again.

Here is what happened: The IT help desk request was routed to the proper person and about three hours later it was being routed to the group that would have a look at it, once its turn came in the queue. (Since my request was not mission critical, I had not set it to the highest priority.) My post on The Hub was answered within 30 minutes, with detailed, easy-to-follow instructions about ...