Not long ago Eric Schmidt said that every two days, we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization to 2003. On a given day, an average employee makes 14 phone calls, logs in to 9 different systems, receives 100s of emails and shifts through 1000s of files. But, this is not sustainable. We need to create contextual experiences for employees to find the information they need in the flow of their work.

The future of knowledge management is about letting employees curate their own information consumption, empowering them to be in charge of their own learning and professional development.

Conversations need to be indexed, but so do updates from processes, customer interactions, and news about related projects. External data needs to be brought in to enhance internal data, and people need to be able to act in real-time–not ask 5 different people for a file or wait until tomorrow because their manager is half-way across the world.

Information today needs to be searchable, and it needs to be accessible anytime, anywhere. Relevance is subjective, but 21^st century knowledge management provides different experiences for everyone, adding the right conversations in context. This is the power private social networks can provide.

You can categorize content all you want trying to make it more contextual to different groups of people, but at the end of the day, I know what I need to do my job well. With private social networking, I can follow the people I need to follow, search for subject matter experts that can help, get updates from the business applications I use, and tap into the on-going conversations happening around me, so I can spend less time in meetings, searching for files, or waiting for the answers I need to do my job more effectively.

To continue reading, download the related resource When Collaboration Meets Community: How Enterprise Social Networking is Transforming Business