Intranet Design: Put Management of Your Company's Knowledge in Employees' Hands

I have often advocated on this blog for introducing user-generated content tools into your intranet environment. Your organization will benefit if you give employees a way to share their expertise, knowledge and experience with each other on tools like blogs, microblogging platforms and wikis.

User-generated content = good.

But today I am advocating for an even more important element that is often overlooked in intranet design: User-generated context.

I've been moved to this way of thinking after reading Andrew McAfee's new book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges. One of the most interesting ideas in the book, for me, is McAfee's discussion of how a collection of individual actions can yield group level benefits.

To explain that idea McAfee describes how Google developed a new paradigm for determining the value and relevance of Internet content. Google doesn't rely on human beings to analyze and categorize Internet content (as Yahoo! did in the early days), and it doesn't rely on an AltaVista-like "spider" approach in which the search engine crawls across the Web reading meta tags to determine what each page was about. The first model clearly is not scalable, the latter makes it too easy to lie to the search engine by putting in bogus meta tags that make your page appear higher in the results.

Wanting to return more reliable and relevant search results, Google developed an entirely different approach. Google based it's search results not simply on what people said their page was about, but by paying attention also to how many people had linked to a given page. Google's assumption: The more links to a page, the more valid and the more valuable the content on that page must be.

And that's the idea of individual action delivering group level benefits: individuals, one at a time, without knowledge of one another, chose to link to a given Web page. It happened one link at a time, but in the aggregate it proved a significant indication that the page being linked to was valuable. The structure of results we all see when we search using Google is the group level pattern that emerges as a result of the multiple individual links made.

It should be your goal to create a similar opportunity with your intranet. To realize the value of Enterprise 2.0 you have to put context control over your company's professional knowledge into the hands of employees. Each employee must be empowered to add to the knowledge base by expressing the ideas that they think are important. But letting them express ideas is not enough. To really achieve group-level benefit from these individual acts of expression you need to do three things:


1) Increase the number of employees who can engage with the content their colleagues create (tear down the walls -- more about this in my next post)
2) Allow any person engaging the content to link to it, to tag it (think delicious.com for the enterprise) and by doing so, create relationships between that content and content of their own, or other content posted elsewhere on the intranet
3) Reveal to the organization the links the community has established between pieces of content and the associated tags the community has created

These actions by individual users build a context around the ideas that no appointed editor or knowledge manager will ever be able to establish as well. An editor simply will never see all the ways an idea connects to other ideas -- those connections are only visible when ideas are filtered through experience, and an editor only has his or her own experience through which to filter. But when you allow each member of a community to filter each idea through their individual experience, to identify and create the links they feel are appropriate, then aggregate the many individual connections into a collectively-derived context for each piece of content, that's when you really begin to get lasting benefit out of the knowledge collected in your intranet.

User-generated content = good
User-generated context = better