01/27/2011 01:23:00 PM EST
How to Find Answers Within Your Company – Would Quora Work?
Making sure that people get the right answer to questions
is vital to the success of a business. From a compliance perspective, it's
important that questions in the compliance domain get answered correctly. It's
just as important that compliance professionals can find the correct answers to
their questions.
On one side you have GRC, trying to answer questions
related to governance, risk and compliance in an integrated platform. But
lots of questions will still be ad hoc and outside the information in the GRC
systems.
One of the latest Web 2.0 darlings is Quora. It's a continually improving collection
of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by the community.
Quora
I found
Quora mildly interesting, but a compliance nightmare.
From the perspective of a lawyer, answering legal
questions in a public platform is fraught with peril. I found most of the
legal questions to be vague and incomplete. It's an easy trap for a
less-careful lawyer to inadvertently create an attorney-client relationship or
legal liability. For financial professionals, you can easily trip over the
requirements for record-keeping and preapproval if the answer related to
financial advice. (I have only
answered questions about snowboarding.)
I view Quora as another knowledge management platform
placed in the public web. It's interesting to see it work, but I'm skeptical of
its viability. I've seen many question and answer platforms come and go. Quora
adds the improvements of requiring registration, community run organization and
rating of answers.
Quora seems to still be at the stage of altruism. People
are asking questions and answering them out of curiosity and the willingness to
share. The marketers and self-serving, underemployed consultants will come
eventually and fill it full of inane answers and ads.
Once the shiny newness wears off, what will keep someone
coming back to contribute content? That has always been the problem of
knowledge management. It's hard to get the experts who really know the answer
to contribute their response. A recent article in the MIT Sloan Management
Review drove home this point: How
to Find Answers Within Your Company.
Knowledge Markets
Altruism will only last so long and a person's
willingness to contribute will wane as the next fad comes along the web. The
challenges and the needs are different when you bring a knowledge market, like
Quora, inside your company.
The first generation of knowledge management was all
about centralized systems. They produced mixed results. They ignored the market
for knowledge and just imposed a top-down centralized structure to try
capturing work product.
How
to Find Answers Within Your Company points out that the system failed to
place a value on contributed material or, if it did, the value was fixed. The
failure to gain contribution was largely a failure to understand the economics
of contribution. Bebya and Van Alstyne point to three forms of incentives:
spendable currency, recognition for expertise and the opportunity to have a
positive impact.
You can't fix the price. Information that is more
valuable than the price is less likely to be created. Experts won't waste their
time. When information is less valuable than the price, less-expert workers
will volunteer just to get compensated. This is the classic knowledge
management problem, getting the experts to contribute and highlighting the best
content. The paper offers examples of knowledge systems that added a
marketplace to better value and price contributions.
It's not just about cash. Take FourSquare as an example.
They use gameplay to encourage people to check-in to locations. Earn a badge or
try to become mayor. They also offer the cash reward of specials offered by
merchants.
For anyone interested in improving their ability to
capture knowledge, the article provides lots of other great insights in what
works and does not work in knowledge markets.
Sources:
For additional commentary on developments in
compliance and ethics, visit Compliance Building, a blog hosted by Doug Cornelius.