Connecting Organizational Silos: Taking Knowledge Flow Management to the Next Level with Social Media

Chapter 10

Final Thoughts

Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes.

Peter Senge, MIT-based author, researcher, and educator

Whether you skipped to this last chapter or you made it through the whole book, I want to leave you with a few final thoughts.

In the previous chapter, I outlined some potential developments in the future and pointed out that some of those might be just guesses. It is very hard to predict certain developments in this field, and it is even harder to say what will come next, as some developments take a lot longer to be successful and others occur more quickly than anticipated. For example, tablet PCs were around for over 20 years, but they had little success until simplicity and touch technology finally led to the iPad and an incredibly fast adoption rate, with millions of tablets making it into consumers’ and business users’ hands.

When adoption is slow it is easy to fall into the trap of putting down a development as a failure, but maybe it is just not ripe or certain features are missing that are delaying a mainstream success. This can happen if a feature depends on technology that is not yet developed or connected. Other times it is that users are just not ready to make that jump into something that seems radically ...