In today's workplace, as in the past, workers are valued by their organization for their ability to find information quickly, for knowing whom to speak to when seeking subject matter expertise, and for being good at sharing information. Traditionally, this has often been achieved through sheer longevity. The longer a person worked in an organization, the more likely they were to know where to find different types of information and who the experts are among their co-workers–they typically built relationships with these experts. And when co-workers came to them, they were able to share with them the information they had. While organizations still value these capabilities, business has changed dramatically. Organizations don't tend to retain staff as well as they used to, and relying on long-term staff to supply critical organizational knowledge can quickly become impossible with the departure of a few key people. Collaboration tools, such as Microsoft's SharePoint Server with its social networking functionalities, offer a new way to work, allowing information workers to identify experts and find and share information based on social networking similar to what they already experience outside the organization, through public Internet tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogs and Wikis. The advantage that behind-the-firewall corporately managed tools such as SharePoint have over public tools such as Facebook is that, they, unlike the public tools, provide the ability for an organization to monitor or establish codes of conduct and to ensure they meet regulatory requirements around record archiving, for example. The simple use of web search tools such as Bing and Google may even be detrimental to an organization if, as a result, its store of corporate information, for instance, is not being leveraged by workers, to say nothing of the fact that information acquired externally may also be sub-standard, inapplicable or even incorrect. Most of us in the business of working with corporate information are familiar with the problems of getting different departments to sing from the same song sheet. More about this in my next post…