It’s not everyday that I attend a SharePoint conference and become engaged in academic discussions about the value of knowledge sharing and content intelligence. Such was the case when I attended the opening keynote of the KMWorld 2012 of which the SharePoint Symposium was a part.
A Higher SharePoint
Listening to David Weinberger, one of the authors of Cluetrain Manifesto and Co-Director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab at Harvard University; and Jeremy Bentley, CEO and founder of Smartlogic speak about how the concept of knowledge is changing and how applying content intelligence to the information collected can improve its value, respectively, you can’t help but understand SharePoint on whole other level.
When you think about it, SharePoint isn’t simply a platform, it’s a knowledge network. The benefits of knowledge networks go way beyond simply sharing information. According to Weinberger, participating in knowledge networks, whether it’s SharePoint or Reddit, makes us better equipped to be better humans. We learn how to appreciate the power of disagreement and difference, while at the same time we embrace humility and display generosity. It takes a lot to ask a question in a public forum, and requires great confidence to supply an answer. Even if we are able to hide behind a clever moniker or avatar, participating in knowledge sharing makes us quite vulnerable.
Is Your SharePoint Portal an Echo Chamber?
As a result, Weinberger cautions, we resort to echo chambers to make us feel safer and secure. We are among our own in forums where we’re most likely to agree with the answers given, whether they be political, personal or professional in nature. Weinberger challenges us to embrace the messiness, the vulnerability and the uncertainty that knowledge sharing brings by learning how to appreciate difference and diversity of the crowd.
When creating our own networks, he urges us to learn how to deal with difference in useful ways, like approaching issues from different perspectives, or asking questions about the things we don’t know and inviting others to ask questions about us.
When you think of SharePoint, the same strategies should apply. Are your users power users, or everyday users? Has your SharePoint portal become an echo chamber for your team, or is a place where diversity thrives? If not, it may be time to take a step back and examine the integrity of your knowledge network.
How Smart is Content Intelligence?
In every knowledge network, there is information. But how is it structured? If you’re still managing your information the same way you did a decade or more ago, Jeremy Bentley suggests that you might want to add some intelligent content layers to it.
For starters, you probably have a lot more information to manage than you did a decade ago. It used to be that you had information overload. Now you have big data. The difference — how you handle it. With content intelligence, you can better identify what is your information. It’s almost impossible not to label it something (even if most of us label it unstructured!).
Once you identify it, you need to extract meaning from it. What's in it? Once you extract, you need to classify it to determine what it's about.
Again, the same process can be applied to how we share and manage information within SharePoint. It sure would make it much easier to use if we knew what information there was, what's in it and what it's about, wouldn't it? The same content intelligence is just as vital when it's self-contained, as when it's being shared. Bentley says that the new world of big data needs a new layer of content intelligence — and I've even argue that it's just as true with each new generation of SharePoint.
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Source : cmswire[dot]com
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