Turn Information into Knowledge with Collaborative Curation

[MichaelDortch]

What do great performers, great museums, and noteworthy thought leaders in every arena have in common? Their reputations and perceived excellence do not depend upon their abilities to create new material or works of art "from scratch."

Instead, what people in all of these roles often do best is curation. That is, they use their knowledge, experience, and preferences to select content and material created by others. They then add their unique analysis, interpretations, and presentations to that content and material, creating value without having to create new material themselves.

The coolest thing about curation? You can do it, too. And if you're involved in IT, governance, risk, and compliance (GRC), or delivery and management of services and processes at your enterprise, you and your colleagues should all be knowledge curators as well.

As you doubtless already know all too well, there's always a lot of relevant information "out there." And by "out there," I mean not only in the world generally, but within your own organization. In fact, one of the first important steps your enterprise can take towards service and process excellence is capturing and prioritizing the "tribal knowledge" scattered among you and your colleagues.

The challenge is deciding which of all that information is actually valuable, and extracting that value. That's where your unique combination of experience, skill, and knowledge, and that of each of your colleagues, comes in. Because each individual is different, different individuals can spin the same information in different, yet equally valuable ways. So everyone has something interesting and potentially valuable to contribute.

More good news: it's very likely that the tools your enterprise is already using to manage and automate IT services include features that can make collaborative curation a reality at your organization as well. If you're using ServiceNow, for example, the ServiceNow Knowledge Base is a great starting point. It can be used as a shared repository for all kinds of knowledge, and supports user self-service, feedback, and comments. As articles are added to the Knowledge Base, and users are encouraged to access and comment on those articles, collaborative curation takes place organically.

This process can deliver immediate value to your enterprise's IT service management and automation efforts, but that value can quickly extend far beyond these areas. Content, curation, and discussion focused on business-critical processes can quickly and effectively improve those processes, and help those developing new processes or solving current problems to avoid reinventing already existing but unknown wheels. (As a ServiceNow partner focused on helping clients get ITSM and GRC right, we're kinda big on solid processes at Intréis.)

This function alone can often justify creation and management of a knowledge base, even if it's not used by or for IT. And even at enterprises not (yet!) using a knowledge base, other tools can enable and promote collaborative curation. With tools such as ServiceNow's Live Feed or Microsoft's Yammer, users can post articles and other resources, attach comments to these, and respond to the comments of others. And the subject- or role-centric groups or discussion threads supported by such tools make it easy to focus content and collaborative curation on specific topics.

So how best to foster useful collaborative curation at your enterprise?

1. Collect and consolidate what your colleagues already know. At some organizations, this may simply mean consolidation of multiple collections of knowledge that already exist. At others, it may require encouraging those with knowledge to write it down, or to be interviewed so it can be captured. But this needn't be a complicated or cumbersome process. Simply asking your most experienced or successful people to cite their three most valuable sources of information, then sharing and soliciting comment on those lists, can be a great start.
2. Want to gather relevant information from the outside world for you and your colleagues to curate? Create some Google Alerts on topics that matter to your enterprise, and links will get sent directly to your e-mail inbox. It doesn't get much easier, and they're free.
3. Select or acquire a tool or service that makes it easy to capture, store, annotate, update, and share knowledge. Remember, you may already have one or more worthy candidate solutions at your enterprise. And if you don't, there are "social software" solutions with pricing that begins at free.
4. Encourage everyone to participate. Everyone at every organization knows something useful to others at the enterprise. But without the ability to collect, collate, and share that knowledge, its value is muted. Collaborative curation is a sure way to "turn up the volume" and the business value of that scattered individual and tribal knowledge.

A September 2014 Intréis blog post, "The CIO of Tomorrow," cites "The Four Personas of the Next-Generation CIO" as defined by long-time IT industry thought leader R. Ray Wang. A quote from said blog post: "Wang hits the nail on the head with his description of the Chief 'Intelligence' Officer, who chooses to inspire the business with 'actionable insights.'"

I couldn't agree more. And I emphatically add that those CIOs and other enterprise leaders who enable and encourage collaborative curation of knowledge and information at their organizations are the ones best positioned to succeed, today and tomorrow.

So, who's enabling and encouraging collaborative curation at your enterprise? What results are you seeing?