To see what might be next, it is worthwhile to look at the devel opments over the last few years—specifically the role of the Web and those developments (technically and socially) named under the umbrella term Web 2.0.

To say exactly which concepts and technologies were Web 1.0 and which ones were Web 2.0 is hard, and I will leave that discussion to others. It is not necessarily technical features that define the difference. Some of the technologies that now make headlines have been around longer than many people think. The technical possibility for user-editable Web pages, for example, were there for a while, but only the very easy interface and concept of a Wiki made it spread like it did. And with the clear benefit of a huge encyclopedia available to everybody for free, millions became familiar with the basic Wiki concept. From there it was a logical next step to get a good critical mass of users putting in the extra effort of actually providing content as well.

So, what is the big difference from a knowledge flow perspective, since we have blogging, podcasting, community sites, and much more?

A knowledge flow lives and dies with participation. And that is where a lot of those concepts fit. Making it easy to get away from consumption of static Web pages to participation was a major step forward. The motivation for people to get involved and participate on such a large scale was what surprised many. In some ways open source was a key development that pushed this. The development of Linux as a computer operating system and similar efforts with thousands of developers providing their knowledge for free to create something together was first limited to technical people. But it turned out once you make participation even easier, you could wake that same spirit of providing knowledge to a lot of other and growingly nontechnical areas. People are now helping each other in online forums on anything from buying a digital camera to cooking that perfect Irish stew.

Another success factor is the decentralized character of participation. Even in early Web applications, there could be multiple people involved and participating, but it was usually from a central perspective. They would have to have some type of access to the central place. Things were centrally controlled. The “Web site” was holy; only selected people were allowed to touch it. In Web 2.0, this has changed dramatically. The Web site is only an anchor for people to add, modify, and remove content. Everybody is an actor. And the function of those handling the main site (such as Wikipedia or Twitter) is to make participation easy for everybody but otherwise keep in the background. Keeping in the background does not mean, however, leaving it alone. Instead it means to steer it, to do some viral marketing, and to get a growing community involved, until you pass the bootstrap phase, where you have a lot of supporters helping you spread the message and scale up.

So even with Web 2.0, the technology is only the enabler. The power is with the people, decentralized, direct, and often ending in a person-to-person exchange. Great examples for the decentralized aspect are the community sites such as LinkedIn, Xing, and Facebook. In the old days you would have a phone book at some point including people’s e-mail addresses. But with a more globalized world and people moving around a lot, it became harder and harder to keep phone books up to date. People move and the link you had to them (e.g., a phone number) would change. But the need to inform all your friends and former business contacts about that change are over. Community networks were the solution. All you keep is a link to those you want to keep in your virtual phone book. The detail data are kept up to date, not by you but by them. So if five years down the road you want to contact a person, she will have updated her telephone number, e-mail and street addresses, and so on. And maybe she also added a Skype account so you can just push a button, launch your video camera, and have an almost lifelike conversation with her in seconds.

While there are many other effects of social communities, for me this was a strong argument to get started. A number of companies and universities have moved their alumni networks onto those well-known platforms, saving a lot of effort and money over trying to manage alumni contact details internally, a fight they were losing.

What is on the horizon? There is some talk about Web 3.0 already. For some it will mostly be about wider usage of semantics in a way that data is combined with extra information (metadata) clarifying the meaning of that data. As the metadata is passed along with the data it opens up more possibilities for automatic data exchange and integration. For others the key is cloud computing, where the web becomes even more the computer and data and programs are located remotely. I think those concepts and supporting technologies are definitely on the rise, and they will help with some of the scaling issues. In the case of cloud computing, it can extend the “everywhere connected” movement. Instead of dragging your data around, you just keep it in one place—the nebulous cloud—and attach to it from a range of devices, wherever you might be. To be honest, I am not sure, if that really is such a revolution that it deserves the 3.0 version tag.

Instead, I think those and other developments will open up opportunities for additional inventions that together with certain social and human behavior changes might really be revolutionary, and those might deserve to be seen as making up a new version. Whatever that version is, it will influence the knowledge flows on the Web and, with some delay, within organizations as well.

Tagging or social bookmarking is a technology-based concept where a number of people use keywords (provided via selection lists or free-form as they spring to a user’s mind) to categorize, or “tag,” content. The items being tagged could be news items, Web links, and more. Good examples are digg.com, reddit.com, and Delicious.com.

The concept of digg.com, reddit.com, and Delicious.com seems like a great candidate to consider for integration into a business environment, and they do have the potential for supporting the knowledge flow. The basic idea is not so much to share the content itself but to share pointers to the content. When a larger group of people votes on certain pointers, these will end up high on the list and supposedly represent the most valuable items.

A few issues need to be hashed out to make this work within organizations:

The local community will still play a role, but for many people, especially the younger generation, communities are defined via some online representation. That does not mean that there is no physical representation of it. In fact, one of the interesting effects that I have observed with my college-age daughters is that they actually do not get “lost” in the online community but use it to manage a wide and international physical community. Facebook is used to stay in touch, but meeting physically is still what it is often about. Facebook is the tool for them to keep that level of familiarity and trust that is needed to engage on an intense level. As mentioned, trust is one of the key prerequisites for high-level knowledge exchange to happen. Online communities fill a void that was created when people started to move around the planet more and as deeper relationships became harder to establish and keep.

In that sense an online community (or at least portions of it) can represent a real community that might actually meet. An example would be those who use Twitter to state that they are in a certain place going for a drink in the hotel bar just to see if there is someone in the same hotel interested in spending some time for a chat over a beer.

In a similar way, specialization in important key roles in an organization seems to be the next step when a function gets that important. What seems somewhat harder with the roles needed for knowledge flow management is that the type of knowledge that people need in that role spans areas that have been separate for quite some time. The technological and human aspects within organizations are often still far away from each other. Human resources (HR) staff are using some of the technology as well now—HR intelligence and HR portals are getting a lot more common—but to really bring people issues and technology issues together needs a special skill set that spans those disciplines. So it will need daring organizations to create and support those types of roles, hire the right experts for them, and actually acknowledge their value to the organization by not putting them down as some sort of administrator but recognizing what they often are: key personnel to guide and manage your organizational knowledge flow. It is essential that educational institutions will need to do their part to provide organizations with well-educated candidates who are capable not only of the right kind of bridgelike thinking but also are equipped with all the knowledge and tools needed to help organizations get their knowledge flow running in an optimal way.

If you take that thought further, we might be at a similar step in the development of humankind. Where in the Stone Age it was more the move from communities of 20 to those of 200 or 2,000, today it is the move from a few thousands to millions, as what is happening on the Internet at the moment. The scale increase is incredible. Are these large platforms like Twitter and Facebook always used for something intelligent or sensible? Definitely not. But who is to judge what the outcome might be in some cases? The key is to focus on the potential, not on misuses, even if in sheer numbers misuses might outnumber value-producing usages. Just because some people do some really stupid things on those platforms does not mean everything done with them is stupid.

In a few hundred years, an anthropologist might confirm the potential introduced by scale and diversity as another great step in the development of human intelligence. What that means for those looking at organizational knowledge flows is to be open, to experiment, and to be careful not to lock themselves into narrow thinking or inflexible platforms that cannot keep up with process changes and new human behavior.

First, I believe that most organizations currently still have to be viewed as different from the Web as a whole when it comes to judging success of an initiative. In an organization, people usually view success or failure by the number of people who participate, and 100 percent would be nice, right?

But look at the numbers you get on a successful knowledge flow initiative out there in general Web terms. Out of the 1.6 billion Internet users,² if only 0.5 percent would participate in your external initiative, you have 8 million people involved. And if only 0.5 percent of those are really self-driven, motivated, and enough of an expert on a given topic to get involved and invest personal time, you would end up with 40,000 super-motivated stars to push, create the pulse, and drag more people into it.

Organizational settings are on a much smaller scale. So you cannot rely as much on self-organizing principles and coincidences internally. For that reason, you have to add a level of support: the drivership.

From a tools perspective, one class of tools will start playing a larger role in the future: automation. While I am a strong believer that technology cannot solve the knowledge flow problem, I believe that certain types of technologies will play an important enabler role.

Text mining and content categorization technologies will help to build ontologies and taxonomies to support folksonomies. They will need to deal with highly dynamic environments, where static- and human-built taxonomies will not be able to keep up with the speed of change.

Social networking analysis will support the knowledge flow, as in the future Web world (internal, external to organizations, or across boundaries) the network itself defines where knowledge flows. So making them visible and analyzing and optimizing them will be a large part of building environments supporting knowledge flow management.

Advanced business analytics are the enabling technologies to provide the right inflow. Your knowledge flow can be really good, but if the knowledge that people develop and share is based on incorrect, out-of-date information and is missing some key insights, it will be limited. So the underlying information delivery and business analytics capabilities of the organization will play a key role.³ But innovation and knowledge creation happens not only with those types of technologies. It also happens at the border where technology and humans touch, so one important question on any type of knowledge flow management initiative is about the cut-off point along the human- technology continuum, as discussed in Chapter 1.

The cut-off point is different for different types of knowledge. It will also constantly change; as technology evolves, it will lean more to increased usage of technology. As new questions arise and people get to a higher level, it might also move back to grasp and require more of human intelligence.

But because the answer to this question is constantly changing, the high-level strategic initiative guidance is important. It drives not only productivity but also motivation. If the cut-off point is farther toward human activity, there is more of a burden but also more control for the human side. Moving it too much toward the human side will have negative effects on productivity. However, often humans are still better at sensing business process changes and adapting to them on the fly.

If the cut-off point is more toward the technology end, higher trust in the technology involved is needed. And as more technology is mapping business processes, it needs to be very well aligned to what really happens and also be flexible enough to cope with changing processes. Otherwise, the acceptance of and trust in the technology will be destroyed, and people will actually work around the intended technology support. An example might be the type of undocumented rules that coworkers make up on the fly and use to overcome issues where the technology does not fit the process anymore (or never did for that matter).

There are many cases where people have fully underestimated developments based on certain enabling technologies. The time between the prediction that the world would not need more than a handful of computers to a billion of them was only a matter of a few decades. So to predict the level of change that we might experience in the next decade is a daring task.

Just the fact that the technology is available will not mean it will become an immediate breakthrough success. Multiple factors are needed to get people really motivated to use a technology on a large scale. There were other MP3 players before the iPod and other touch screens before the iPhone, but these Apple products were able to push much bigger waves than the pure availability of the basic technologies. It needs humans to play along, and they must develop that motivation to use them. Nowadays this means the technology will have to come with a certain “coolness” factor. If technology comes with that, you can actually charge higher prices for the same or even less performance. People are getting used to double speed, double pixel, double storage capacity, so it loses its attraction as the single selling argument. This development could shift in other directions in the future. Perhaps in 2020, “cool” will be out again and be replaced by other motivational factors.

One area of technology that is still in major development is that of search. Google currently is the clear leader in the search market, but people are asking for more. There are a number of challengers around. The biggest issue is that the amount of content seems to be growing faster than the advances in search technology. While search engines are a lot better today than they were in the past, they do not seem to be keeping pace with the growth of information to be searched. New search engines attempt to deal with natural language processing,⁴ and others propose to add semantic information to provide context. Semantic content can really enhance search results, but I see considerable challenges with the scaling. Producing semantic information without human interaction is still very complicated. Developments in this field are not as far along as some might have predicted. The process still needs a large number of people who are ready and willing to add the semantic information that is needed. It requires effort; successful implementations will need to reduce that effort to such a low level that people feel motivated to spend the effort instead of being stopped by the barriers. There will likely be technological help in the reduction of that effort, but in the end if you want to use the crowd, each individual will decide whether he or she finds it worthwhile to spend that effort.

Another issue that I see is the role that commercial interests will play. In the development of Web-based technologies, some sort of commercial interest has usually helped the development at the beginning. At the same time, however, overreactions of those following commercial interests have also slowed the success at some point. Examples are spam in the form of e-mail, blogging, and microblogging. And just like the speed of distribution increased and the time frame until one of those trends reached wide success decreased dramatically, the time it takes for the “bad guys” to catch up is getting shorter. Technologies that bring ongoing improvements will need to deal with those attacks. They will have to have some principles built into their initiative that makes them less vulnerable for some spam or misuse. In the case of social networks, growing distractions, overuse of advertisement, and problems with spam will lead to people leaving as they find the usage more annoying than beneficial.

One interesting recent announcement was that of Google Wave.⁵ I find a number of elements about it interesting. Its development is not a big bang; actually, Google had made it available early to a large community of developers, building on the collective knowledge of crowds. The strategy is to go for early access and open and wide distribution. While it has some new ideas, it is not totally detached from what people do everyday with e-mail, for example. It just brings together a number of streams (such as chat, multimedia, video, e-mail, and tweeting) in one place. Thus it is not really revolutionary, but it is a logical evolution. More and more people are using multiple channels anyway, so why not give them a more integrated way of using them? It is not a leap; it is more of a natural step. People like improvement, but at the same time many are hesitant to go for big change. Google Wave could actually become an attractive alternative to omnipresent e-mail.

The other interesting idea with Google Wave is that it is open to the point where any organization can create private internal waves. At least at the time of this writing, it looks as if instead of trying to lock people to a platform it owns, Google is trying to make a concept that others could benefit from successful and widely distributed. Of course, Google will be linking business models to it.

A whole range of additional technologies will play a role in the flow of knowledge in general as well as within organizations. Usually they spread based on the large scale of the Internet and then make it into organizations in a more controlled, supported, and smaller-scale version.

The key will not be the technology itself but the type of support those technologies are introduced with in organizations and how they align with the humans who are supposed to benefit from them.