Internal communities help people within an enterprise solve problems faster and more effectively. A vibrant community, which brings together people from across the organisation will also generate more innovation.

A key component of the community is the ability of people to access knowledge already available within the company. Knowledge can be found by searching the community platform for stored knowledge or to locate the people that posses, or have access to it. Having immediate access to such knowledge leads primarily to a reduction in the (re)search costs incurred (you don’t need to hire external expertise so often). In situations where access to the shared knowledge of a community is not available, time to research a subject increases dramatically along with costs. In the communities we manage we have seen savings of hundreds of business research and analysis hours on a single subject.

Such a system provides great benefits both for the organization and for the individuals. This should be reason enough for people to contribute to the community. In reality, however, it proves to be tremendously difficult to motivate people to help colleagues and lift these constraints on sharing knowledge. There are many reasons that govern this reluctance. Many aspects are psychological, such as fear of not being taken seriously or fear of losing the monopoly on that knowledge. Such psychological factors are complex to manage and take time and trust, to change for the better.

There is one factor that has great impact on improving access to knowledge, that can be managed quite easily. Instead of asking people to actually answer a question, you describe your ‘knowledge need’ and ask people that could help you to make themselves known. By doing this you start to build a ‘knowledge network’. These knowledge networks are very powerful in giving people access to knowledge. You can think of them like hyperlinks on the web pointing to relevant sources, only this time the links point to relevant people. Besides being a powerful way to unlock knowledge this method also helps lift the constraints on sharing I described earlier. People no longer have to be scared of losing their monopoly on knowledge as they remain the gatekeeper. Further, the time investment to indicate you have such knowledge is negligible. In our active communities we also see signs that it actually encourages people to share as it’s a way to profile themselves as an expert within the organisation.

At one of our clients an employee was asked to work on search engine optimization (SEO) for the website of a specific division. She posted a request for help on the internal community asking who had experience implementing SEO for a website. Five specialists replied that they had experience and would be happy to help out. Recounting her experience, she reflected that access to the knowledge of these people had saved her at least two months work and she had no need to hire external experts to get her going. Furthermore, in the future anyone with questions about SEO just has to search for the term and will have access to the knowledge in an instant.

So how do you create the environment in which this can happen? You need to shift the paradigm in peoples’ minds that you do not have to share the knowledge itself. We find that the best way of doing so is to set the example by sourcing two or three knowledge requests and asking a number of experts to make themselves known. Once a few strong cases are visible people catch on very quickly.