Social networking technologies in business

The recognition of the value of knowledge in the organisation has increased the focus on how to leverage the knowledge workers, how to create a shared knowledge base throughout the firm as a learning organisation and how knowledge workers can work together to create extended value through collaborative problemsolving to create a competitive advantage through growth and innnovation. This knowledge creation depends on a firm's ability to facilitate communication and organisational learning through firm-specific routines and culture.

The firm is composed by multiple knowledge workers with each their expertise. Managers have been seeking to make this knowledge shared and available to all, and through ICT this has become possible. Much of earlier knowledge management has been criticised of being data- or information management, as the focus has been on effectively manage, store, retrieve, and exploit intellectual properties. ICT especially enabled organisations to store this information and share it across the organisation. The new type of knowledge management, focus on knowledge as something that they do rather than knowledge that a person has. This way of working requires the organisations to be what Blackler (1995) calls "Communication-Intensive". The dynamic process of knowing requires more of ICT than just being an information repository, and this have fostered the managerial interest in new ways of sharing knowledge and collaborating across the organisation.

ICT and the internet has enabled organisations to leverage knowledge from dispersed sources, and also collaboration across geographically dispersed locations as well as across organisationall boundaries. Tools are continuously developing to fit the nature of dynamic collaborative work, addressing the challenges of virtuality and also creating advanced ways of collaborating through technologies that has not been possible in traditional approaches.

As mentioned, earlier approaches that has been critisesed of being information and data-repositories as managers have seeked to tap the knowledge workers for their knowledge to be retreieved by the whole organisation as collective knowledge. But as many scholars and practitioners have acknowledged - the ineffable dimension of knowledge cannot be retrieved in symbols, information is highly contextual and knowledge is best transferred through the practice in which the knowledge is embedded. Moreover, it is difficult to get employees to write reports and document their knowledge as it has not been a part of their everyday work practices, and as it has not given more value back to their main task and objective in the organisation. And the knowledge captured at one point might be outdated the other. In order to benefit of and support the dynamics of knowing in the organisation and the multiplied value of social capital, dynamic and flexible technologies are needed. The capturing and retrieveing of knowledge is still essential in Knowledge Manegement Systems in collaborative working but an extra layer is added to it to complement each other: connecting people.

Many concepts come from the social sphere, such as forums, chats, blogs and the concept of presence to mention some. These have emerged from the social concepts of the web; forums for sharing of common interests such as baking or computing, chats to get to know people with common interests and blogs to share and publish personal or professional information, presence as to letting people within your network know if your online, available or busy. The technolgogies which enables the user to connect to people and manage its social network we put under the umbrella term Social Networking Technologies (SNTs). These technologies are moving into the business sphere as they've become a part of how people naturally communicate and collaborate. In this sense the boundary between work and non-work is becoming blurred and the social culture of communication is coming into the business world resulting in business communcation becoming more informal. The concepts are getting more aggregated into one common platform enabling the employees to collaborate using the same habitual concepts of communication. These technologies as lowered the barrier of connecting and sharing and have also proven to be effecient ways of filling the social gap in the nature of collaboration (to connect).

Businesses must embrace these technologies now as the generation entering the job market are expecting the web 2.0 technologies to be a part of the collaboration environment. By embracing these technologies I mean: aligning the organisational strategy for collaboration with the IT strategy, looking at tools/concepts that can fit the goals of collaboration. Technologies is nothing without people using them. They are tools to support people in the way they work so including the organisation in the process is key. A culture for sharing and collaborating and making the use of collaborative technologies is built through a shared ethic of interdependent contribution and formalised set of norms of interdependent process management.