MIT Sloan Management Review

Five years ago Cisco created its digital social educational platform, Learning@Cisco, which today has over 2 million global participants. People in IT sector go to the site to get Cisco certifications, to find industry jobs, for tips on finding work and to share information. This network has helped Cisco grow its industry, create loyalty to the company, recruit and become a key source for strategic marketing information.

In 2006, MIT Sloan’s Andrew McAfee coined the term “Enterprise 2.0″ as shorthand for collaboration and sharing tools would mean for enterprises. In a recent interview with MIT Sloan Management Review, McAfee looks back at the past six years and reveals what he’s learned about the triggers that generate CEO interest in social networking, what he misread and why the idea of controlling information flows is becoming obsolete.

The CTO of Tata Consultancy Services describes how he learns from his organization’s collective intelligence.

Internal knowledge markets can facilitate information sharing within large organizations. The trick for executives is figuring out how to make them work.

Maybe not, according to an article in the new Winter 2010 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.  In "How Reputation Affects Knowledge Sharing Among Colleagues,"  Prescott C.

Companies that provide professional services have not always been eager to invest in customer education initiatives. For such companies, it has remained unclear what economic benefit they would gain by providing customers with the skills and abilities needed to become more knowledgeable customers.

If you devise strategy by thinking only about the positioning of your company’s product or service, you are missing a huge opportunity.

The departure of talented employees can actually benefit a company, depending on where those individuals are hired. Therefore organizations must learn how to lose certain battles in order to win the war.

Organizations have often turned to well-established and very competitive global cities when looking to expand their markets. However, new research suggests that many corporations have been going to these cities for the wrong reasons and consequently have missed opportunities to build strategic advantages and organizational capability.

In most large organizations, CEOs and senior management get the best technology and the best technology support, but this practice may actually put revenue at risk, according to two Unisys Corp. studies conducted over the last year.

Many large multinational corporations are hardly a model of organizational efficiency, with the right hand frequently not knowing what the left is doing. A valuable solution developed at one location fails to spread to other sites struggling with a similar problem, so they continually have to reinvent the wheel.

Departing employees leave with more than what they know; they also take with them critical knowledge about who they know. That information needs to be a part of any knowledge-retention strategy.

Do we finally have the right technologies for knowledge work? Wikis, blogs, group-messaging software and the like can make a corporate intranet into a constantly changing structure built by distributed, autonomous peers — a collaborative platform that reflects the way work really gets done.

New research shows that the most resilient companies are those that continually orchestrate a dynamic balance of four innovation strategies.

The benefits of knowledge management are often accepted as a given, but its role in producing specific desired outcomes is not well known. Recent research employs survey-based and qualitative analysis to determine the effectiveness of various knowledge management methods in driving and supporting new product development.&

Information and knowledge management models that exclude the influence of national and regional culture seriously undercut their potential effectiveness.

Many companies have struggled to design IT systems, databases and content repositories that provide their employees with easily accessible and relevant information. The authors urge organizations to emulate the strategies of Google, eBay and Amazon.com, whose core competence is based upon making it easy for customers to find what they want — quickly, accurately and usefully.

We may be in the second decade of the knowledge-worker era, but companies still have much to learn about what makes such workers tick.

Knowledge management is creating processes not just for learning and retaining what is important but also for avoiding or unlearning what is not.

For “knowledge-based” to be more than a buzzword, managers must recognize that the concept has little to do with the kind of products they sell. Whether it‘s a cement maker like Holcim or a financial services company like CapitalOne, a company‘s knowledge base is predicated on how it uses knowledge to change processes, overcome traditional boundaries, set strategy, and create a corporate culture.