The Baldrige Criteria ask four questions specifically about how you manage knowledge in your organization:

• How do you collect and transfer it internally?
• How do you transfer it from and to customers, suppliers, partners, and collaborators?
• How do you identify, share, and implement best practices?
• How do you assemble and transfer knowledge for use in your strategic planning process?

In his book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges (Harvard Business School Press, 2009), Andrew McAfee describes how organizations use emergent social software platforms to capture and share knowledge, identify and leverage expertise, generate and refine ideas, and harness the wisdom of crowds.

These platforms include wikis, Twitter, Facebook, and other software tools. In an interview (you can listen to it here), McAfee, principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for Digital Business, talks about how these tools fuel a shift in “aerating your work.” One example he uses is the U.S. intelligence community, which saw its inability to manage knowledge exposed on 9/11. Since then, the intelligence community has deployed new 2.0 tools including launching an internal Wikipedia, encouraging blogging within strict guidelines, and developing a search function to improve access to shared information.

McAfee sees two hurdles most organizations must overcome to take advantage of these new tools. First, leaders are not aware of how the tools work and how the new tools can improve internal knowledge management. Second, they’re afraid that using the tools will make it impossible to control confidential information.

McAfee tested that concern by asking a lot of organizations that are using the tools to share their bad experiences. He didn’t hear any. “When you let people narrate their work and ask and answer questions freely, people do it in almost exclusively competent and healthy ways,” McAfee said. “There are almost no Enterprise 2.0 horror stories of people violating confidentiality”—or of posting inappropriate content, harassing coworkers, or griping about the organization.

Baldrige organizations have taught us that organizations that operate as a system, aligned in support of their missions and visions, outperform their competitors. The emergent social software platforms support this by helping organizations identify, capture, and transfer knowledge and information from across the organization.

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