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

SOCIAL OR SUPPORTING SOCIAL

One of the reasons that social media has made it into organizations is, clearly, the growing usage of these types of tools and platforms on the web. People of all ages have experienced the effects that social media tools have had, and they continue to rely on them in their lives. While not all of it seems immediately transferable into daily business life, the potential benefits of interacting and sharing with others within an organization have become obvious to many. Part of this shift is based on the business models of social media platforms, which became very successful even though they offered the majority of their services for free. One way to cash in was to transfer what worked externally into organizations.

One example of a tool that has found tremendous success external to and within organizations is Google search. A number of organizations find it very appealing to have their internal content just as easily searchable as the rest of the external web. The result was the introduction of Google appliances—black-box machines that would be placed in organizations, index a broad range of content, and present a localized search interface that was a lot better than what prior search technologies could offer.

One of the reasons why such technologies are considered to be worth paying for is that they are proven to work. They have been developed and tuned for several years in a challenging environment where there are literally hundreds of millions of users ...