The communities and tools we’ve looked at so far face the public. Communities are flourishing within enterprises too, driven by a need to communicate freely and transparently with coworkers. Internal communities are a recent innovation in the field of knowledge management (KM). Ideally, KM lets organizations maximize their information resources and optimize collaboration.
That’s easier said than done. It’s hard to get employees to share what they know, since much of their knowledge is tacit, informal, and hard to extract. A significant amount of a company’s information assets is buried in email messages and attachments as unstructured data. Employees spend their time digging through inboxes and duplicating efforts; wisdom walks out the door every night.
Internal communities provide one way to change this. “KM 1.0” consisted of static intranets that were little more than a place to store information. Recently, however, organizations have realized that for KM to work well, it has to be integrated with the way people work, rather than a separate system that expects workers to change. By giving employees tools like chat, instant messaging, wikis, and forums, a company can make more of its inherent knowledge accessible in ways that employees adopt quickly, and that don’t require them to change how they behave.
The methods we’ve looked at for monitoring online communities also apply well to internal communities. There are some important differences, however: employees, unlike anonymous web users, are required to use KM tools as part of their jobs, and the metrics that we use to define success of internal communities are different from those for outside ones.
Internal communities have different goals than their externally facing counterparts. They need to:
Capture knowledge from many different internal sources, many of which are integrated into existing chat, email, and messaging platforms.
Improve knowledge retrieval by users so that employees can find the right information faster.
Communicate what’s important so coworkers can see which topics and issues are salient to a particular project or timeline and also to see what other employees are working on.
Provide feedback to managers so they can identify top contributors and use employees’ productivity for performance reviews.
Not all companies organize their information in the same way. Consider two leading analyst firms, Accenture and McKinsey.
Accenture focuses on the storage of information—employees are rewarded for documenting and storing knowledge in a way that makes it easy for others to retrieve, using consistent formats and metadata. Those employees are less likely to be subject matter experts. By contrast, McKinsey is all about expertise: the company emphasizes making it easy to find the person who is the authority on a particular topic.
This difference has far-reaching consequences, as documented in “Analysis of Interrelations between Business Models and Knowledge Management Strategies in Consulting Firms” (Sven Grolik, available at http://is2.lse.ac.uk/asp/aspecis/20030056.pdf). The study found that Accenture has younger employees and a higher rate of employee turnover, but because its KM emphasizes the codification of knowledge, this is acceptable. By contrast, employees at McKinsey, who are rewarded for service inquiries, tend to be older, and work there longer. Accenture has a standardized, centralized approach, while McKinsey allows less standard forms of communication and more decentralization. There’s no right or wrong strategy here, but you want the KM you employ should align with the structure of the organization in which it will be used.
When crafting a strategy for monitoring internal communities, consider not only the goals of the community—knowledge capture, findability, communication of what’s important, and management feedback—but also the organization’s KM strategy. This will dictate what you measure, as well as which tools or platforms fit the way your employees work.
There are some other big differences between internal and external communities. First, employees may be expected to use the internal community as part of their jobs, so you may have a higher percentage of contributors than you would have on a public site. Second, you can contact your internal community directly—you have the email addresses of all the members, so you can announce changes and encourage interactions.
Just because employees may be obligated to use an internal community doesn’t mean they’ll want to. If you’re in charge of an internal community, your focus will be on quality of contributions and making the application something your users want to use, instead of just something they have to use.