Knowledge Management, Social Networks and Innovation: Google Plus - Term Paper Example

Knowledge Management, Social Networks and Innovation- Google Plus Introduction Google search engine is amongthe most used search engine in the entire world. The firm ranks as the only company to have such a bang on the world’s population, capturing information-craving Americans “Googling” for anything and anything imaginable. The company has grown enormously since its invention in 1996. The initial design of the search engine application was at Stanford University by two computer scientists, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The initial search engine was named “BackRub”, which used links in determining the importance of individual web pages. Two years later, the company formalized and adopted the name Google (Reichental). Since then, the company has presented various services and products to the market, including web applications of all kinds and various forms of advertisement, all in various languages. The company’s website and its more than 180 domains contain vast information, including local news, international news, sports news, and even local stores and post offices addresses. It also contains images, patents, maps, and many more (Young). The new advertising paradigms services and products of the company have stirred the imagination of entrepreneurs and business. Google has since tripled its profits and operating margins. Fig1: Google’s revenue growth. Retrieved on Feb 4, 2012, from http://www.crito.uci.edu/papers/2007/google.pdf In summary, Google has presented a variety of services and products over the past years, but there is one area of application that seem hard to crack, social networking. The recent unveiling of Google Plus is among the recent developments of social networking application (Serrat). Google has in the past tried to develop other social network services, but with a degree of failure. Starting from the acquisition of Pyra Labs, Blogger creator, the company has had other major involvement with the social media. Some of the important acquisition by Google includes Picasa, You Tube, DodgeBall , Postini, Zingku, Feedbanner, Jaiku, and Aardvark. Other social media applications developed by the company include Orkut, Google Talk beta, Google Reader, Google friends Connect, Google Voice, Google Buzz, and Google Plus. Table1: Google Products and Services. Retrieved on Feb 4, 2012, from http://www.crito.uci.edu/papers/2007/google.pdf Google Plus is a social network that integrates various platforms of other Google products like Profiles and Buzz. The social network was launched in June 2011. The key element of Google Plus is the focus it places on targeted sharing among members of a given subset, or circles, within the social group. The subsets or circles are simply a small group of people with whom one can share with, with names likes classmates, co-workers, friends, and family. The social network also incorporates a section primarily for viewing, editing, and managing multimedia objects (Monash Research). A user may access all the photos he or she has shared, including those that that he or she has been tagged in. This section has advanced features in relation to the other popular social networking application like Facebook and Twitter, which include options of photo editing (incorporating Instagram-like effects), sharing features, and privacy options. Fig 2: Google Plus circle. Retrieved on Feb 4, 2012, from http://www.thetechlabs.com/tech-news/google-plus-p1/ Another additional feature of interest is the ‘hangouts’, a group chat feature. The feature allows a member of the social network to enter instantly in a video chat room alone (Brockbank). Concurrently, a message goes out to his or her social circles informing them that their friend is hanging out. These friends may then join the hangout on the condition that they are in one of the circles that the creator of the hangout has invited. The Google Plus network received a major boost when US president Barrack Obama used the social network on Monday, 30 January 2012 in one of his social media sessions. Google Plus also incorporates social sharing, providing a +1-button fro user pages. The same feature in other social networks shares these links on the wall (like Facebook), but the Google Plus application allows users to share the page and influences the search results of people within the circles of the user in relation to the terms. Moreover, the huddle feature allows interoperability of group chats on different platforms, like mobiles running on Android operating system and personal computers. Google Plus is the first social network to integrate third party applications into one networking system. This makes chat interface simple and convenient, incorporating similar techniques of Gmail Chat that records chat sessions on the Gmail page. Literature Review Knowledge management has proved important in recent times, especially in web-based applications and data management. In a world that embraces social networking as a form of communication, more people, as well as organizations are exploring ways to benefit from them. An important part of Google Plus as a web-based application is the incorporation of knowledge management principles. This enhances the social network’s ability to handle data collectively and systematically. Google Plus incorporates a semantic web 2.0 application that transforms the content and technology smarter through addition of semantics to the data. These applications help such a social network to become an intelligent assistant to the human, enabling them to be more creative and innovative. Google Plus takes knowledge and adds an iterative effect to it. It transforms the contents to a social object. This means that the content is no longer a point it time, but rather an object that is part of a social interaction, like a discussion in a chat room or on the stream of a Google Plus user. Through evolution, the pillars of the structure of the content disassemble (Maier, 2007:61). For instance, content in a chat room may change meaning as the discussion continues, or conversations that link customers and people may defy categorization, and the fact that comments and other posts do not present an obvious taxonomy. Knowledge management The Google Plus social network and the Google search engine are founded on the concept of knowledge management. This is the reason why a user receives instantly a link for the website they are searching for high in the list (Costa, 2011:105). Knowledge management is the primary concept in Google’s search paradigms. The firm similarly applies this concept in the Google Plus network. There have been many gee-whiz stories concerning server farms and millions of megabytes disks packaged in shipping containers in attempts of allowing establishment of more server farms, but none holds waters sufficiently than that of knowledge management (Salazar and Sawyer, 2007:283). The discipline of knowledge management enables organizations, individuals, and teams to systematically and collectively store, create, share, apply, and capture in achieving their different objectives (Paladino, 2011:363). Knowledge management has been there since before, but there new concepts emerging, including innovative knowledge processes, knowledge networks and communities, and enabling and supportive technologies and tools (Hulsmann and Pfeffermann, 2011:237). Individuals and organizations that take an initiative of implementing an effective knowledge management system can obtain substantial benefits. These new tools and technologies mainly include web-based technologies, with emphasis on the web 2.0 social computing, and the read and write preparatory web (Evans and McKee, 2010:21). The two technologies enable people in different parts of the world to collaborate, communicate, learn, and share information and knowledge in disruptive but beneficial ways. These technologies and tools pose a challenge for the traditional management strategies and sciences in organizational innovativeness and development (Warren, Davies, and Simperl, 2011:16). These technologies evolve the world from the era of multi-national and global organizations to include global individuals. This creation of a global individual is achieved through the self-publication of our ideas, opinions, and thoughts through social networks and blogs, enabling individuals to share their knowledge with the entire world (Gawer, 2009:3). Knowledge management thus enables individuals to obtain new insights, learning, opinions, ideas, and knowledge and this helps in influencing what the world feeling and understanding (Kim, 2011:571). This is the foundation of all social network services, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google Plus. The application of knowledge management will indeed bring great achievements and improvements in the entire work circle, but organizations and individuals applying business concepts will achieve the greatest potential of this concept (Kimmons, 2010:9). Google Plus application of knowledge management incorporates a business paradigm that enables it to maximize the benefits of knowledge management. It is important to refer back to Peter Drucker’s insights and ideas on management science. According to Drucker, the most unique and important contribution to management in the twentieth century was the productivity of the manual worker in an organization (Romm and Setzekorn, 2009:56). This was a giant step in the development and adoption of management science. Additionally, Drucker emphasized the importance of the knowledge worker in the twenty-first century. Google is among the first organizations to advance the ordinary business models while the society, business, and culture advance in expert models. There are several types of innovations, including market-led and technology-led innovations. Druker identifies seven sources of innovations (Newlands and James, 2011:43). These include incongruities of different kinds, process needs, new knowledge, demographic changes, changes in perceptions, new knowledge, and changes in markets and industries. Through regular and continuous provision of innovations, social networks provide a platform for presenting knowledge. There have been radical and fundamental changes on the tools and processes of knowledge and information by the web (Barnes, 2002:52). Storage of knowledge is easy, the only changes comes in determining the best strategy of storage. This is relatively easy for Google Plus, considering the firm has been providing the best search engine for more than a decade now. The current knowledge worker is said to be more stressed and confused, thus rarely achieving their objectives. This results from the daily performance pressures and demands, leaving them with little or no time for pro-activeness (Thielke, 2011:16). Knowledge workers undergo lack of creativity and high stress levels due to information overload, email overload, new initiative overload, attention overload, and new applications. With the current technological advancement, it is difficult to understand why. Worth noting is the fact that technologies, no matter their level of advancement, are not the absolute answer (Goldfarb, 2011:7). Technologies provide a great opportunity for development, but on the condition that there exists new knowledge communities and innovative knowledge processes (Spencer, 2011:35). These new knowledge processes and communities need a strategic alignment to the business principles, policies, and objectives of the firm. Technology changes over time, but business principles do not. The three timeless principles in business are productivity, quality, and relation. These principles are underpinned by knowledge, thus knowledge management should have an alignment with the three principles (Predovich, 2011:67). In economics, the issues that underpin an organization are the operational and strategic knowledge on improving relations, increasing productivity, and developing quality. While designing Google Plus, the firm identified the main types and areas of knowledge that could make a difference and achieve the objectives of the social network (Bottletree, 2011:23). The results are among some of the exclusive features in all social networks, including the hangout and photo editing features, as well as sparks that enable users to stay informed on the topics of their interest. The problem of creativeness and innovativeness in our organizations result from the shortage of systematic and innovative methods processes, tools, and methods of capturing and manipulating them in meaningful ways (Shanan, 2007:255). Most organizations still practice episodic innovation and learning, with project review taking place several months after their initiation. This happens to other web applications, but social networks employ a different approach to knowledge management (Wimmer, 2004:25). The main challenge of knowledge management efforts occur in sharing the knowledge. Google Plus provides a streaming application service that enables individuals to share this knowledge in form of opinions, ideas, images, and others (Dalkir, 2005:122). The network provides enough trust between users through maintaining privacy of their information. This then triggers a natural communication and collaboration among friends, resulting to natural learning. In turn, learning increases the competence and confidence that leads to natural knowledge sharing (Babar, Lago, Vliet, and Dingsoyr, 2009:61). Through such applications and methodologies, Google Plus changes the knowledge paradigm that exists. The past models of knowledge management included creating and storing knowledge at a specific point in time. This might be a document written by an individual, and needs to go through approval before publication (Maybury, Morey, and Thuraisingham, 2002:187). The current social networks, with emphasis on Google Plus, presents workers and executives with other fast alternatives like online conversations and contributions. A prime example is that given earlier of President Obama using Google Plus to address the nation at the end of January, providing instant answers to questions posed by the other users without the professional written speech replies (Bramer, 2010:14). The change to adoption of commercial social computing influenced by consumerism presents an important observation: the future revolves around managing unstructured content. The application of knowledge management in social networks like Google Plus presents a challenge to the best technologies, practices, and years of efforts in supporting the traditional organizational insight in terms of structured, curetted opinions (Qualman, 2011:53). Nonetheless, this might be a very important step in knowledge management. There is a bright future for entrepreneurial social networks, Google Plus in particular. This is evident in its growth, surpassing other major social networks like twitter by a significant margin. Fig 3: Google Plus growth. Retrieved on Feb, 4, 2012, from http://www.googleplustutorials.net/google-becomes-the-fastest-social-network-to-reach-50-million-users.html In the future, Google Plus may become the central place for knowledge management. The social network provides evidence that many of the benefits that users enjoy in other consumer web pages are now features of the application, including ranking of relevance through circles, effective searching, and appropriate grouping of unstructured data (Evans and Bratton, 2008:97). The application of knowledge management in the social network creates new value to the content. For example, information concerning an employee is usually stored in the internal corporate information system, and includes details like start date, role, department, title, etc. in the instance that an organization seeks the information of an individual, then they may get this information from their system. However, the organization may obtain more detailed information from a social network like Google Plus, including photos, hobbies, or even previous employment records (Bozarth, 2010:155). Accessing an employee record will avail information keyed by others, as well as availing the values and history of the organization, list of executives, or competitors, all these from the large web repository. Social media is good, but there is need to acknowledge that it cannot replace traditional knowledge management (Shanan, 2007:164). This is because context of work varies in different organization, thus presenting difficulties when relying only on social tools. Secondly, not every individual uses social media, highlighting implications in the accuracy, breadth, and depth of information in social networks. Lastly, emerging privacy laws influence fragmentation of social media in large organizations. In conclusion, Google Plus-driven knowledge management relies less on the traditional management components. In the past, the world has spent years cleaning, validating, and categorizing data. The future seems to present another form of knowledge management, which will involve spending more time analyzing knowledge created through social network interactions, like Google Plus (Eardley and Uden, 2011:36). The result will be smart analysis with new insights, ideologies, and innovations, which provides powerful values for businesses and organizations. This is a very complex space, but the social media provides a magnification of the challenges. Bibliography Babar, M., Lago, P., Vliet, H., and Dingsoyr, T., 2009. Software Architecture Knowledge Management: Theory and Practice. Berlin: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. Pg 61 Barnes, S., 2002. Knowledge Management: Theory and Practice. London: Thomson Learning. Pg 52 Bottletree Books, 2011. Google Advertising Guerrilla Tactics: Google Advertising A-Z Plus 150 Killer Ad-words Tips and tricks. North Carolina: BottleTree. Pg 23 Bozarth, J., 2010.Social Media for Trainers: Techniques for Enhancing and extending Learning. 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