Welcome

So what's this blog all about ? Well, it's a step in our investigation [or research, or experiment] into what is involved in internal social networking and Communities of Practice [CoPs]. We'll set down our thoughts, findings, processes, and anything else that seems useful. Why are we doing this ? Traditional approaches to knowledge management are in poor shape - they rarely seem to add value or help with effective sharing of knowledge. In fact, they are sometimes an impediment, especially where the process is, or is perceived to be, more important than the result. Many companies have a vast amount of valuable information and intellectual capital stored away in various nooks, crannies and silos. It could be an intranet server that is inaccessible to a group on the other side of the world , or knowledge obtained during a previous engagement that remains locked up inside someone's head, or whatever. The important thing is that the result is the same - information that could potentially make a difference, sometimes a big difference, isn't freely available, and in many cases people don't even know enough to know that the information is available. So, we're trying to explore some different ways of sharing knowledge, and in particular exploring how less process driven, more informal tools and techniques such as social networking [analysis], the formation of Communities of Practice, weblogging with RSS feeds and aggregators might contribute to better knowledge dissemination within and without an organisation. As I said at the beginning of this post, we'll be posting plenty of stuff as we go along, details of what we're doing, learnings obtained, resources that we discover. Hopefully this blog will serve as a project diary and resource repository, as well as itself being an object of study and experimentation.