Mixing business with pleasure

There have always been two distinct parts to people's personas in the working world. There is the corporate persona and then the social persona. In decades gone by, it was very easy to separate these two, as work was work and play was play.

Trying to protect a company's intellectual property is like chasing twigs in tornadoes.

Shiona Blundell is divisional manager: communications and business process outsourcing at Bytes Document Solutions.

These days, however, the boundary between work life and social life has become almost indistinct, with the advent of both the mobile worker and the prolific use of mobile devices. People can work and play interchangeably, with scarcely a moment's consideration for which mode they are in at any given time.

In this scenario, trying to protect a company's intellectual property (IP) is like chasing twigs in tornadoes, which is where collaboration, content management and the ability to manage the company's knowledge come in. The kind of collaboration that gave Twitter a market cap of billions.

Given that workers are transient within a corporate environment, how do companies ensure they are getting the true value out of their best assets? How can they make sure they are storing not only their structured information, but their IP as well?

Collaborative content management platforms allow for conversation platforms around a traditionally structured environment, ie, that of document management. To generate the same activity as social platforms do, corporate document and knowledge management environments should become a little more like them. Traditional content management platforms provide the company with a structured repository according to company taxonomy and file structure. This approach does not allow for individuality, and what is becoming known as folksonomy.

Folksonomy operates on the premise of individuals rather than corporates. So the result is that when people are empowered to share information and conversation in a less structured manner, they feel a sense of ownership over their content, contributions and presence. And today's worker is developing the expectation that the kind of bottom-up sharing and information exchange they benefit from and use so widely in their personal lives, should be available in the workplace to aid business collaboration and discovery.

By using a collaborative content management system, companies can start seeing a few quick results, such as:

1. It gets people, who are working on similar or related projects
2. talking to one another,
3. and actively searching for information
4. that relates to their work interests and activities,
5. and promotes new relationships with other employees
6. involved in similar work,
7. then stores all of the shared information, and
8. makes it searchable and

9. retrievable.

Content management systems, together with a social media flavour, are a natural foundation for intra- and inter-business collaboration due to their inherent connectedness and desire to share, rapidly, a wealth of structured and unstructured information from a range of formats and media, and make it all searchable and available, anywhere, at any time.

But, better than that, when done properly, it actively seeks the information relevant to the user and filters out the information that isn't.

Using new technologies, active agents sift through that content to present users with what's relevant to them through a user-friendly interface, and it refines that information over time based on user preferences and activities.

These days, the ability to find knowledge in organisations can sometimes be more important than the inherent knowledge currently being held. Systems that make use of semantic matching can automatically index the contents of documents, not just by keyword, but also by conversational themes, creating metadata that speaks not only to the keywords in the document, but also to its conversation themes. It doesn't matter if the users each have different keywords in mind for the same thing, because cutting-edge semantic matching brings consistency to the metadata process.

By combining the best of content management and semantic matching, companies can approach the issue of IP in a unique and collaborative way, which ensures user interaction across the flow of IP.

Capturing and sharing content then becomes what it should always have been - keeping simple things... simple. And it is the sheer simplicity of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook which has been part of their appeal, and will drive the appeal of the approach outlined above.