Building Sustainable Communities for Business
To be successful in business, employees and collaborators must be able to share knowledge and exchange information about common interests, duties, and job functions. Online communities offer an excellent platform for individuals to easily share, reuse, and adapt information across normal organizational boundaries.
Author: Richard Iams, Senior Analyst
Overview
Unfortunately, online workspaces are often created with little insight into how typical users will find, use, and support the communities and the knowledge they contain. They are often created with few guidelines or capability for classifying information. Information is frequently migrated into generic site designs without a clear understanding of users’ business needs. Rules to help a community grow efficiently are often not established or consistently followed. As a result, users find the community difficult to use, it does not save them time, and their expectation of finding information or expert help when they need it is left unmet. Poor design and management of online communities diminishes benefits and wastes resources.
However, successful and sustainable communities can be achieved through strategic and operational planning in three key areas – goal, design, and governance.
Read more on this white paper: Building Sustainable Communities for Business.