Promoting Best Practice Sharing within Organizations

Abstract

In recent years we are witnessing the wide adoption of Web 2.0's social software tools (blogs, microblogs, wiki, forums, shared calendars, etc.) within organizations complementing (or even replacing) existing enterprise applications. This trend is justified by the improved immediacy with which information can flow among the members of the organization and by a better support of agile, emergent cooperation models that reshape the practices and the processes within organizations, allowing their continuous refinement and alignment with the organizations' missions and evolving know-how. One of the problems that arise in this new scenario is that as more and more practices and processes include interactions with several tools, often not controlled by the organization itself, it becomes more difficult to manage the knowledge they embody. In this paper we present an approach to mitigate this problem that plays nicely with the enhanced participation mechanisms triggered by social software. Our proposal revolves around the use of semantic wiki technologies as knowledge management tools; specifically we focus on dealing with practice and process-related knowledge, emerging from users interactions with Web 2.0 applications, and how this knowledge can effectively be represented, shared and made persistent.