The Black Hole War re-introduced me to grok — Robert Heinlein’s term (from Stranger in a Strange Land)
for understanding something deeply and intuitively. Susskind used it to
explain why people have so much trouble with quantum-mechanical and
relativistic concepts … they have no way of grokking them.
It’s also a reasonable way to understand why many IT departments
loathe a technology that might solve two long-running business
challenges.
The challenges: Keeping the enterprise skills database up to date,
and achieving true “knowledge management.” The technology: Social
networking.
It’s like this: For years, companies have sought the holy grail of
an accurate, up-to-date, employee-self-administered skills inventory.
As doing so requires a bit of time and effort, provides no noticeable
benefit to the employees, and only happens when it occurs to an
employee that something needs updating, most corporate skills
inventories contain data that isn’t worth shoveling, let alone mining.
At the same time, many companies have attempted to implement a
discipline wrongly titled “Knowledge Management.” It’s wrongly titled
because managing knowledge provides no benefit. The payoff comes, not
from managing it, but from sharing it.
And once again, the solutions mostly consist of asking
already-stretched-thin employees to spend time updating a database —
the Knowledge Management System (KMS) — without giving them much of a
reason to do so.
Corporate knowledge-sharing? Mostly an informal activity among
friends that ignores the KMS. Accurate enterprise skills tracking? A
non-starter.
Meanwhile, millions of people enthusiastically keep their Facebook
pages up to date with … well, sometimes with considerably more than we
want to know. Scattered throughout is information about what they like
to do, what they’re good at doing, and what they’ve learned that’s
interesting and worth sharing.
It’s filled with what KMS and skills inventory administrators drool over.
Yet the default condition for IT, aided and abetted by Information
Security and Human Resources, is prevention rather than exploitation.
Why? My guess is that those responsible for IT management, Information
Security and Human Resources don’t grok Facebook.
Some are suffering from a potentially lethal case of Social
Networking Dinosaurism Syndrome (SNDS), denying any possible value for
the technology without even using it, let along grokking it.
Others have a milder case, having academic knowledge but not personal experience.
I’m among the latter. I’m active enough on LinkedIn that my case of
SNDS isn’t lethal, but I certainly wouldn’t call myself a social
networking grok ‘n roller either.
Here’s what I can say with confidence: Those responsible for
encouraging knowledge-sharing and an enterprise view of employee skills
can gain important insights from social networking sites. Here are two:
1. Facebook’s subscribers want others to see what they put up for
display. That’s in contrast to how most companies approach knowledge
management and skills inventories, which are defined in terms of what
the company wants them to share.
2. Facebook makes the whole experience fun and engaging. Can you say
that about your knowledge management system? Your skills inventory
database? Of course not — this is serious business, and fun has no
place here. It’s why we call it “work.”
I don’t know exactly how you should apply these insights to
knowledge-sharing and skills-inventory management. I doubt the best
solution is Facebook itself. I’m pretty sure, though, that as friends
from Texas sometimes say, “There’s a pony in that barn somewhere.”
There’s a certain sad sameness to what most of my age cohort has to
say about social networking: “I don’t use it and don’t intend to. I
don’t understand why anyone would want to socialize on-line instead of
face-to-face. It’s a symptom of what’s wrong with the millennials.”
That’s in contrast to my conversations with a few in my own age
group and more in younger ones. They explain how enjoyable it is to
keep up with friends remotely and in real time, and to expand their
horizons by making new friends from all over the world.
It reinforces a conclusion I drew some time ago: Getting old consists of spending more time disapproving of how others spend their lives than enjoying how we spend our own.
And so, with some regret, I’ll probably have to invest time and energy into Facebook, to cure my case of SNDS.
But I draw the line at Twitter.
