Only if it is shared. I am sure you have all heard this before. This is not ground breaking news.

The World Wide Web changed the future of mankind. I doubt Tim Berners-Lee and his team had little understanding by how much. Both positively and negatively. It has given close to 60% of the world population access to knowledge. 

And let us focus on the positive narrative vs the negative one in this instance.You can type into a search engine :

How do you.... 

where do I...

What is...

Who does...

How much...

If you have never done this before, you will be amazed at what sort of questions people ask and look for in their day to day lives. Including in your industry and solution / service.

Voice is taking this one step closer to be more human like, just as you would ask a friend, teacher or colleague at work. Instead of just tapping into their knowledge bank you now have access to millions if not billions of data points. 

Ok Google...

Hey Siri...

Alexa...

Cortana...

If you haven’t started playing around with voice, just click the mic logo in Google search bar, on either desktop or your mobile / cell phone and see how it feels in terms of a user experience.

Whilst this article looks at the start up world, Organisations can leverage the same technology and behaviours. 

You can deploy mini world wide webs across your business ecosystems, large or small using things such as Microsoft Teams, Slack or ProFinda. What these enable you to do is connect multiple knowledge points together, eg your staff. Everyone in your business knows someone or something. It’s just a question of connecting the dots. You can create groups, open and public. Have private chats. Even invite your clients into specific working groups (subject to your IT Security policies). This also enables you to connect to your people around the world in real-time. 

No more group emails :

does anyone know? 

can we work with? 

Cakes on floor 3 for "someone you don't know" birthday. 

This also enables you to access previously untapped knowledge banks in your firm. Which could lead to all sorts of opportunities, saving time, internal moves or promotions and more cakes. 

However, for any of this to work, there has to be a culture in place that empowers and allows this to flourish organically. 

I witnessed this first hand in a previous life at a global firm. The business deployed Yammer as was - the internal comms could have been better. No, what's in it for me. There was no real burning platform on the ground as to why we needed to communicate differently - some staff still had Balckberries so they couldn't even access the app.

I embraced it immediately as I could see the benefits of tapping into this global knowledge bank. Setting up groups, asking questions and seeing what happened. 

And this is what happened. The part of the business that was on the consulting side embraced it, organically and communities naturally formed, by sector, geography, client, sports groups, well being groups and more. You were watching an entire ecosystem come to life, as if it were the dawn of time. This was how they operated already.

Then, we had the transaction side of the business. The deal makers. They operate in a one dimensional world, outside of which they have very little interest, even if the clients they were working with were global to firm.  This was just the nature of their ecosystem, how they had operated for time in immemorial and would continue to do so. Hence, they didn't embrace this new way of doing things. Why would they, or even should they?

You cannot deploy this sort of technology and expect people to change their processes. And for some, it just will never happen.

That said, firms that choose to endure and push these ecosystems will benefit from the outcomes it generates, especially as the younger generation of employee enters the market.

After all, what is life without knowledge?