The upsides and downsides of social media-type collaboration platforms at work
Leaders: Jennifer Deal and Alec Levenson
Thursday June 17
8am PT / 11am ET / 3pm GMT

Knowledge management and collaboration are two critical challenges organizations have wrestled with for decades. The history of knowledge management systems is littered with attempts to capture information in online repositories (typically static systems) which are infrequently used by the people they are supposed to benefit. And collaboration among people, especially those who aren’t co-located or work in different silos, has always been a challenge. 

Recent adoption at work of social media-type platforms to solve both collaboration and knowledge management challenges has created a new way information can be exchanged and housed.  On the positive side, the systems have the potential to be efficient and effective – and maybe even fun. People are learning how to share information in ways that may be a substantial improvement over the static knowledge management systems.  However, many of the performative behaviors that plague social media are being replicated in these social-media type platforms that are being adopted in the workplace.  

In this session we will explore:

• Can these new internal platforms be better at promoting collaboration and useable knowledge management?
• Are there potential downsides of these new ways of collaborating in terms of team and interpersonal dynamics?
• How do people appear to be collaborating and expressing themselves on these platforms – and are there potential concerns