We have been receiving a growing number of inquiries from customers asking about the business value as well as Microsoft's vision of "Social Networking" and "Enterprise 2.0" and "Social Media" and other buzzwords related to Social Computing in the business environment. While we do have a number of information resources and related news articles on our product information website that describe how the social computing capabilities of SharePoint and Office products provide business value, the holistic vision for how the overall Microsoft Office system can enable an organization to harness the knowledge and talent of its people to achieve business objectives was succinctly described in a white paper authored by Dan Rasmus, Director of Microsoft's Center for Information Work, and published more than 9 months ago.

In the white paper, Dan describes the critical need for businesses to strive towards a Dynamic Knowledge Environment (DKE), which has the right mix of technology and several classic knowledge management principles. The ideal DKE would include:

• Lessons Learned and Best Practices. The core of knowledge management is gaining access to the knowledge that people have obtained in the course of doing business. This requires that people willingly participate by contributing to the knowledge base—a potential stumbling block to implementation in organizations that lack incentives for workers to share what they know. A robust DKE helps organizations to support participation in several ways. Management can promote blogs, wikis, and internal discussion forums where valuable contributors receive recognition and reward. The information shared in these forums is self-organizing and also searchable within the knowledge repository.
• Improved Access to Information. Improved search and file management technologies help people find information according to meaningful content tags, wherever it’s stored. In a DKE, the search function is available across all applications and devices, and can be embedded and invoked from within everyday applications.
• Finding the Right People. Meaningful expertise can exist throughout an organization without regard for formal divisions of labor. A DKE provides several ways to locate and engage the right people, including expertise identifiers that can be built into the organizational contacts directory.
• Distributed Mentoring and Coaching. A DKE encourages people to share knowledge with one another. For example, real-time communication via instant message, online meetings, blog comment threads, and remote application-sharing sessions provides direct opportunities for dialogue.
• Driving Innovation. The primary advantage of a DKE is its ability to embed knowledge into processes. At each point in the process, participants have access to the people and information they need to maximize their contribution. All the knowledge within the organization can be brought to bear on problem-solving. This leads to innovative solutions that incorporate the best, most up-to-date expert and customer feedback.
• Learning from Customers. A DKE assists people in using customer data by enabling them to customize it according to their needs. When data is accessible and pervasive across the entire enterprise, organizations can build dashboards and alerts into personalized workspaces and provide offer customer-facing workers a single view of the relationship to provide better service.
• People as Process. It is virtually impossible to design a process that anticipates every potential outcome. A DKE embraces people as part of structured processes and enables them to access the resources they need in a more flexible and responsive way. When people are empowered as a part of process-driven work, organizations can achieve the economy of structure, combined with the responsiveness and adaptability that only people can provide.
• Making Better Decisions. Business Intelligence (BI) offers executives a view into enterprise data to support decisions—a critical capability in a dynamic, competitive marketplace. Yet organizations that invest in dedicated BI solutions without consideration of the whole knowledge ecosystem may end up with significantly greater IT cost, duplicated capabilities, and system incompatibilities.
• Measuring Knowledge Utilization. Productivity gains from collaboration have always been difficult to quantify. By centralizing the knowledge infrastructure, organizations not only gain the benefits of efficient information search and transfer, but also the ability to observe and measure patterns of search, communication, collaboration, contribution, and process performance.

Dan recommends the following 10 starting points for business leaders to consider as they embark on the journey towards a Dynamic Knowledge Environment:

1. Encourage informal knowledge capture through the use of collaborative technology that works the way people work.
2. Deploy flexible and adaptable technology that amplifies the capabilities of employees by helping them quickly find the people, processes or information they need to be effective.
3. Allow employees to invest in relationships and use their social networks for learning and knowledge sharing.
4. Align incentive and reward programs to encourage knowledge sharing.
5. Embrace innovation throughout the organization as a focal point for organizational learning and action.
6. Build knowledge networks with employees, partners and customers that help anticipate future demand and risks.
7. Build an information architecture that allows the organization to optimize around people, not process, so that people can collaborate, find and use information and build work‐saving tools within the natural context of their role, task and work style.
8. Consider the role space plays in knowledge exchange and create environments that encourage knowledge sharing.
9. Include the recognition of knowledge intensive processes and the retention of talent and knowledge as a specific goal in strategic planning.
10. Define metrics in the context of strategic organizational goals that will demonstrate the value of knowledge investments.

Beyond the Dynamic Knowledge Environment

Organizations can implement many of the capabilities of the DKE using products currently in the market, n conjunction with internal practices that foster knowledge development and knowledge sharing. Looking ahead, several technologies under development may expand the boundaries of knowledge management even further and integrate even more deeply into the way we work.

• Smart content extends the use of metadata to embed audit‐ability, security, and self‐executing applications within documents. Content will not only “know” where it belongs within a data structure and how it can be found in a search, but also who has accessed it in the past, how many times it has been transferred, who has privileges to view, print, and redistribute it, and how it can “unpack” to provide additional functionality.
• Pattern recognition will enable systems to learn and predict user behavior with greater certainty, enabling the automation of more and more administrative tasks. Communication software will use pattern recognition to correlate content and context clues to assign priority to communications, follow people to different devices and locations, and automatically gather documents and resources according to task‐ and role‐based context. Pattern recognition at the system level can also be used to automate administrative tasks such as standardization of data types between different systems, interface configuration, workspace provisioning, etc.
• Location services and smart spaces will project the characteristics of the knowledge environment into the physical world. Offices and conference rooms will “know” who is in them, file cabinets and storage rooms will be able to direct people to the precise locations of physical documents, and people will be able to locate one another and set up face‐to‐face meetings using mobile devices.
• Cross‐platform identity management provides security and authentication across different systems, so people can seamlessly access resources without having to present passwords and credentials. Authentication methods will expand to include explicit biometrics (fingerprints, voice identification, and handwriting) and implicit biometrics (such as typing cadence, facial recognition, and “preponderance of evidence” methods that combine multiple individual traits into a profile that is very hard to spoof).
• Voice‐based systems accept both system commands and input by voice, including in noisy surroundings, with a high degree of precision. Eventually, this will include real‐time, voice‐based translation services, to facilitate knowledge transfer across the language barrier. Voice and other audio will also be interpreted by pattern recognition systems, and its content extracted in ways that allow it to be indexed and accessed. Time codes on streams will be able to precisely identify a point in a video or audio conversation that meets the specifications of a query.
• New display technologies such as digital desktops, digital clay, and digital paper will finally free electronic data from the prison of the desktop monitor and give people a more tactile and intuitive way to interact with digital information.

Microsoft's Commitment to Organizational Learning

Microsoft has been creating the building blocks for a people‐centered dynamic knowledge environment for over 30 years. The latest versions of Microsoft Office system, Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft server technologies offer the richest tools for knowledge creation, collaboration, content management, enterprise search, and unified communications, within the familiar Office interface that people already know and use.

However, technology is not the only necessary component for a Dynamic Knowledge Environment. Success depends on a total organizational commitment to a culture of learning. Knowledge contributors should be recognized and rewarded. Incentive structures should be examined and modified to encourage people to develop their own skills and the skills of their colleagues through collaboration, discussion, mentoring, and communities of practice. As workforce transition accelerates because of trends in demographics, globalization and technology, organizations must act quickly to preserve their knowledge assets. A Dynamic Knowledge Environment offers comprehensive capabilities to create, transfer, and retain knowledge, based on a rational and cost effective IT infrastructure.

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft's Vision for Information Work and Dan's white paper, go to http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/business/relationships/insight/talent.mspx.

And for a recent video interview (~17 minutes) of Dan being asked about the challenges and opportunities (for Microsoft and our partners) in the New World of Work, go to http://blogs.msdn.com/ptstv/archive/2008/04/30/partner-tv-the-new-world-of-work.aspx.

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