Enterprise knowledge sharing?

Question

I recently read this article on knowledge sharing and immediately recognized the same problem within my own organization. My main goal now is to 'kill peer-to-peer collaboration' as the default method of communication for non-private, system related discussions. Otherwise you end up with all of the historical knowledge living in the heads of individuals, or lost in a massive email system.

My question for the group is as follows:

• What methods / software have you used to encourage more 'public' discussions among your developers?

Some initial ideas I had.. any feedback would be great:

• Internal news group
• 'better' wiki software (using Sharepoint now)
• Message board

(I would love to have an internal instance of StackExchange, but don't think that is an option!)

Note: As stated above, we already have a wiki, but I dislike the wiki idea because things are usually only added to the wiki after the fact, if at all.

Thanks!

Answer 1

We have a large internal Sharepoint site and a customer-facing support site, that takes a lot of documents from the internal Sharepoint site. This is less about implementation detail and more about support admittedly, but as I work largely in a support capacity we need access to a lot of implementational information and so we end up being drivers for the engineering team to document what they are doing and why. A detailed bug tracking system is also valuable for following up how problems were solved.

In our company, partly because we have development spread across a couple of locations, a lot of discussions about new features and support problems end up happening over email. Rather than trying to change this, the easiest approach is an email archiving system that makes the discussions searchable and trackable- effectively a newsgroup type approach. We are able to do this through Sharepoint, although one has to be aware of the limits on list size as although it will grow to millions of items you can't actually do much in terms of sorting very large lists or editing views on them without it crashing out dramatically.

Answer 2

StackOverFlow for enterprise like explained in the article you mentionned?

IMHO it's a terrible idea.

It will reinforce competition instead of collaboration.

You need cross division/department collaboration, not increasing their competition.

Also imagine the extremely high negative impact of being downvoted by your coleague (in front of others) can have on your psychic health.

Don't mix everything.

However, an idea box much more uservoice.com where employees can post ideas (anonymously) and other employees upvote them (also anynomously) will have a positive impact. I developed a such platform few years ago for a very large banking institution, and it helped executives to identify what to improve in priority.

Answer 3

I really like the wiki idea as well, but you're right -it's hard to get people to contribute. And without contributions, no one will actually use it because it doesn't have enough information. There is a "tipping point" however in which if you could get people to post (perhaps thru a required business process) at some point the wiki would just take off as it would be this great repository of information.

Answer 4

Pair Programming is a great way of disseminating tacit knowledge.

The problem with tacit knowledge is that it can pretty much by definition not be written down or taught, only experienced. Pair programming (specifically Promiscuous Pairing) provides that.

Answer 5

The knowledge that is important to the enterprise should make it into the project itself, in the form of well-written code, high-level comments about the architecture, and exceptional documentation about the project's goals and how they are accomplished with technology.

I couldn't disagree more with the linked author's conclusions. Encouraging the capture of knowledge by discouraging team collaboration? Sorry, but that's not how it works. It is the collaboration itself that produces the knowledge wealth, not sequestering engineers in cubicles.

Answer 6

My company has some internal discussion boards. They are used very seldom. For the most part, the knowledge we have is either too general (general technology questions/topics that are just as well discussed in the internet) or too specific (applies only to our application and not to other application teams in the same company). It is good in that it does give a place for people to say how do I accomplish xyz here but its not much of a community feel.