I would encourage you to read my article on culture change. There’s always a question whether technology can change an organization’s culture of if the culture must first be changed before some sort of technology solution can become accepted.

Frankly, I think either method can work. When I was in charge of a help desk once upon a time, I encouraged staff to enter answers to common questions in a knowledge base. I made this part of the staff’s performance review process, so there was obvious incentive for them.

Many people do not want to share the knowledge that they have – perhaps because they feel that their job depends on it. However, if incentives are used to encourage sharing, then tools such as the example I provide might then have more and more people buy in to a culture of sharing…

Yes, mainstream adoption is slow, but not as slow as one may think. And no, I’m not knocking your perception, but trying to push a little into what is really there and we don’t see it and how potentially take what is already 95% there and push it to the full 100%.

Email, yes email; “labeling” in Gmail, and “folders” in Outlook; it’s already there. We as professionals and personal folk are already doing and we have been doing it for years. Just like when AJAX was first coined, people (mainly us geeks) were all a buzz. Two words: Oddpost and Outlook. Both were online email interfaces that used AJAX and had been around for a while.

This is all inline with the whole Web 2.0 thing. We’ve already been doing it, it’s just now someone has labeled it. The last 5% is the integration and making the usage and findability more public and so private, of course, where doesn’t the line stop and what is considered private not for prying eyes on company equipment?

Now, with all of that said and to avoid more confusion and brain usage of this little comment box, we can continue if you’d like or maybe setup that lunch we had talked about.