Hivemine’s AskMe Creates Social Knowledge within the Enterprise
by Bill Ives
Hivemine is the new parent company for AskMe, a social business solution that has won numerous awards and established a presence in the enterprise 2.0 space. I recently spoke with David Wachter, their Chief Marketing Officer about their offering. We first went over the difference between formal knowledge, such as policies, procedures, and training, and social knowledge: the most current content that is often being informally shared through out the organization. A social business solution can accelerate the creation, collection, refinement and sharing of this valuable knowledge.
David said that Hivemine understands that the social network is just the start and collaboration is a means to an end but the tools need to be people oriented, rather than document oriented to be effective. The goal is leveraging the best ideas of all employees and the synergy that can come from conversations on how to make things better to produce socialized knowledge. I would agree with all of these points. Simply the practice of sharing knowledge not only gets it in more hands, but also makes it better. The focus of AskMe is creating these useful conversations within the enterprise.
AskMe supports four stages in this process of creating socialized knowledge. Connecting the right people at the required time. Collaborating on topics of importance to the organization. Creating content for future use across the organization and communicating this collaborative output for better business performance. There are four main components to the software that cover these four functions.
Through the Connect capability shown below people can ask questions directed at existing content or ask specific and relevant experts for answers. These experts are generated in four ways through AskMe. The first way is through the content in the profile that everyone develops. The second way is through the actions that people do. The third way is through a rating system where people rate the value of answers that others provide. The fourth way is through a tool Hivemine calls TacitAGENT (auto-generated tagging) that integrates with Exchange and indexes user emails to generate suggested expertise tags based on unique content. Individuals can then select which of these tags they want to add to their profile.
The Collaborate capability allows for the back and forth conversations that occur as questions are asked, discussed and answered. See a sample screen below.
Through the Create capability people can create an FAQ. See a Create screen below. They first start the process with a question. Once they get proper answers the FAQ is created. When it gets more formal and properly vetted, the FAQ can be nominated as a Best Practice. This ranking gets it a higher status on search results. AskMe includes a business rules engine where you can build in company specific workflow for content approval and creation.
The Communicate capability provides users with tools like blogs, wikis, and announcements to help make the content more accessible once Q&A sessions have been transformed into FAQ’s and best practices. See a sample screen below.
I like the focused nature of the tool. It is different than most general-purpose collaboration platforms. AskMe is deployed within a number of large organizations to improve their knowledge capital. For example, Pratt & Whitney connects engineers across programs to share lessons learned and best practices. Novartis enables R&D and Marketing centers worldwide to share knowledge through a central knowledgebase. Microsoft also uses it for cross-organizational collaboration and as a single stop knowledge source.
AskMe is built in the ,NET environment and can easily sit on top of SharePoint and Exchange. It integrates with SharePoint through Web parts but can also work standalone or integrate with other tools. They are launching a SaaS version this Fall which is a great move.
