Have you ever asked a colleague for an answer to your question? If you're lucky, you knew who was going to have the answer. Chances are you sent them an email. Chances further, they will have it and they'll send you a reply saying, "Yes, here's the answer to your question." And six months later, that email is buried somewhere amongst your mass of emails.

Does anybody else in the organisation have access to that email? You hope not. However that also means nobody else can benefit from that knowledge.

So what happens when the situation isn’t quite that simple and you're not lucky enough to know who has the answer?

Most organisations discourage us from sending blanket all@xyz.com emails and the paradigm, ‘email is where knowledge goes to die’ still rings true in many organisations, of all sizes and nature.

So how can organisations start utilising the tools available to them to start capturing and generating knowledge and access knowledge from all sources in your organisation?
Using email as a knowledge and collaboration communication tool is far from ideal and that's why different platforms have started developing other mechanisms to generate and capture knowledge. You want to be able to get the answers to your questions; but, most importantly, you want to be able to share those answers with other colleagues so that they too can use that knowledge.
And, most importantly, you want to make sure that you can get the answer from people that you don't even know might have it.

Social tools
Organisations are increasingly looking to social communication tools precisely for that purpose. Now, I'm not talking about posting an update on Facebook. I'm not talking about sending out a Tweet.

What I'm talking about is having a forum for your staff to be able to freely ask specific work-related questions, problems that they're trying to solve, and finding not only the people who have the answers, but actually getting those precise answers. The best platform to get these tools is an Intranet.

Having a social communications tool on an enterprise intranet is not a one-way tool for marketing or HR policies, but rather a communication tool that allows people to connect with subject matter experts, share similar projects and share tasks, all within the organisation. Those are the tools that are going to allow your organisation to capture knowledge and most importantly, grow knowledge within your organisation.

When you provide a tool for information to be shared and generated like this, answers can be searched, saved and better yet, liked. Each single like, of course, means that that answer has been evaluated and approved.

In an age of information overload, trying to sift through that information and figure out what's valuable and what's not is becoming harder by the minute. Being able to harness this information, share it and appraise it provides streamlined access to the ‘nuggets’ of information that every organisation is looking for.

So, when you're looking at harnessing and capturing knowledge, when you're looking at growing knowledge, when you're looking at using it for a competitive advantage within the marketplace, organisations are turning to social tools like Yammer, SocialCast and SharePoint newsfeeds.
All these tools will not only enable you to capture and search knowledge that's sitting within the organisation, but most importantly, foster and grow that.

Top tips to implementing a successful enterprise social tool

• Educate staff about the different tools available and their purposes
Don't assume that people understand when they should be sending an email, an instant message or a social message, because it's not obvious. They will get it wrong half the time. It's fine to get it wrong as long as they can then start seeing the value of using the right tool at the right time.

• Encourage staff to ask questions
Replace “all-staff” emails with posts to the company newsfeed. This way staff are encouraged to ask organisation-wide questions and avoid the answer being lost in someone’s inbox.
Once an answer is found, selecting a “best reply” can result in an instant transformation of information to knowledge, stored within your organisation’s corporate knowledge forever.
Encourage it. Encourage people to share. Encourage people to create new knowledge by assigning tags, by assigning badges. Acknowledge staff efforts, celebrate their successes, and celebrate the knowledge sharing that can be going on.

• Have a top-down approach
A change management campaign will require several steps. First of all, it requires top down involvement. You need your executives, your CEOs, CIOs, CFOs and Marketing Managers to be communicating on these tools.They need to lead the way on how it's to be done. Have them post at the beginning so that people understand what kind of topics, what kind of questions and what kind of needs are being served with this tool. Have them encourage people to respond. The more people respond, the more people will feel comfortable with using it as a tool to ask questions and, most importantly, deliver answers.

• Provide a powerful search engine
Having all of this knowledge and not searching on it is a hugely wasted opportunity. You have to actively encourage people to search for knowledge. Got a question? Type the question into the search box first. Make sure people understand that they have a powerful search engine that can give them the answers before even asking them. Maybe somebody's already given the answer six months ago and you really want to make sure that you can leverage that knowledge and use it effectively.

Alex Dean, is a specialist in information architecture and business analysis with solution provider Professional Advantage.  www.pa.com.au