Harnessing the power of collective intelligence with Web 2.0

By Enterprise Innovation Staff | Dec 18, 2008

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By Gavin Tay

While the concept of collaboration is not new, it has taken a new meaning as we move from industrial economy to the information and knowledge economy.

In order to excel in today's economy, people (also known as human capital) have come to be viewed as a key asset that creates competitive advantage for organizations.

Many organizations may not have sufficient tools to adequately leverage the brainpower, knowledge and invaluable intellectual capital of an aging knowledge organization. 

With this trend and the need to urgently take the next leap in productivity among knowledge workers, Web 2.0 technologies have evolved to enable people to actively build relationships and share knowledge across the network.

Web 2.0 is the introduction of social translucence which gives users of the web an opportunity to contribute, thus inculcating the "Wisdom of Crowds". This gives rise to the evolution of allowing socially translucent systems to comprehend the interaction among the web contributors by means of a user's profile. 

A profile is central as it describes "who I am", "activities I have carried out", "tags I have associated to all content", and "content I can freely contribute" and most importantly discover presence of a like-minded community. Web 2.0 continues to evolve around the intelligent web we have been working with for years.

Employing Web 2.0 for social intelligence: Does your organization have it today?
Consider a real world situation that permits the transmission of social information that provides traction for our social intelligence:

In another town on business, you and a few colleagues are looking for a place to have dinner. You come to a small restaurant and through its window you see a cozy room with candle-lit tables and waiters bustling about; you can hear the faint murmur of conversation and the clink of glasses and cutlery and in you go.

Everyday we make countless decisions based on the activity of those around us. As social creatures we've spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving an exquisite sensitivity to the actions of others.

In all, digital systems are almost completely opaque to social information. Most of our knowledge about people, most of our sensitivity to their interactions, most of our ability to make use what others know, goes unused. In the digital world we are socially blind.

Employing a socially translucent approach reaps intellectual wealth
A number of organizations have focused on techniques to stem this hemorrhage of intellectual capital. These can be grouped into two major categories: Knowledge Elicitation, which capture and retain tacit knowledge in formats that are easy for employees to access; and  Knowledge Exchange, which foster communication and dialogue among employees to transfer knowledge that does not easily lend itself to capture and storage.

An example is an interview conducted with accountants on how they would use a database of their organization's internal documents. The accountants cited that they'd like to access the documents so that they could find out, among other things, who wrote them, who are the people who've already worked with them or if a proposal is being drafted for company XYZ.

It is interesting to realize that the accountants wanted to use a database to access the people who produced the data. It is only through the people and social networks that the accountants could get the knowledge and social resources they needed.

A knowledge community of this sort, however, has a formidable social problem to overcome i.e. why should those who produce and use knowledge, take the time with perhaps no financial gain to engage in such interactions?

The solution to this problem arises from social translucence because such a system would make knowledge work visible, thus allowing people to observe and contact one another. If knowledge work is made visible it can then be recognized and rewarded by the organization and it can shift from something that takes time away from real work to being real work in itself.

The main mechanism to ensure that knowledge is made visible and traceable such that others can see it occurring lies in conversation as it is through conversation that we create, develop, validate and share knowledge. 

The power and ubiquity of conversation is due to the fact that it is both a deeply interactive intellectual process as well as a fundamentally social one. This all sums up that conversation is a superb intellectual tool for eliciting, unpacking, articulating, applying and re-contextualizing knowledge as well as a fundamentally social process.

Summary
The challenges associated with the Aging Knowledge Organization often do not garner much executive attention. As the situation advances, organizations will soon realize the pain associated with losing expertise, incurring higher recruiting and training costs and managing intergenerational concerns. 

Organizations need to take a proactive approach to address demographic changes both within their organization and across their labor markets, if they wish to avoid issues that could significantly hamper organizations in the industrialized world.

Many organizations are thus employing socially translucent systems facilitated via Web 2.0 to do that because people can interact and exchange information easily. The tacit information that took years to accumulate can be stored in the socially translucent system and be accessed when the employee is gone.

Social information is therefore crucial to any group activity, and that the socially translucent perspective applies to any domain -- ecommerce, distance learning, workflow, workgroup collaboration which uses digital systems.
 
About the author
Gavin Tay is IBM Accredited Senior Solutions Consultant, IBM Software Group, IBM Singapore Pte Ltd.