Today’s post continues this week’s theme of improving the value of your work by capturing more conversations online. Let’s take a look at “7 seconds to knowledge share” on John Tropea’s “Library Clips” blog. John takes a characteristically detailed look at an ephemeral seven-second window between the time a worker learns or does something valuable and the time they move on to their next task.
If you’re driving a collaboration community then you’ll naturally want to help teammates capture their new knowledge to be shared in the future. The quicker and easier people can contribute to your system, the more likely they are to do so. Going one step further and automating sharing can ensure that even more value is preserved for your community:
At work our support team use a support database where users log calls. You can see the progress trail of any given call, and the final solution…then you close the call, and it goes into the ether.
You may have closed a call before any other support worker knew it even existed. Being based in Perth, I only choose to look at calls in my location anyway, so I don’t see the calls from around the world.
At the moment if the call we just closed is unique we add it to our group blog….this is our “seven seconds”.
But this doesn’t always happen.
-John Tropea, Library Clips
While Tropea’s article is a fascinating look at how lowering the cost of participation can raise the throughput of your sharing community, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that automatically logging every little thing people do is going to be your silver bullet. Unless you’ve got Google-grade data mining capabilities, you’ll need someone to sort through all of that information. If you’re running an in-house private collaboration network, be sure that the information you’re picking up is made readily available to the people who contribute to it.
