Knowledge Management and Social Software

Last week I visited a banking customer in Malaysia. They transformed their banking from traditional western style banking to banking in compliance with Sharia law (commonly referred to as Islamic Banking). Transforming an entire bank is no easy feast, just google for " BPR and failure". The bank learned a great deal of lessons, which both form their heritage as well as serve as a template for others. Now the key people who were driving the transformation are nearing their retirement age and the lessons are on the risk of being lost.
In the meeting I was presenting how Social Software with its pervasive availability of tagging can help to preserve that knowlege and introduce a knowlege culture into the way how the bank operates. Knowlege Management and Islamic Banking seem to be a natural fit: both work on the principle of "sharing your gains". To implement "KM on the go" I suggested using Lotus Connections With its capability to surface in any application it benefits knowledge workers directly without leaving their work. However to capture the stories/knowlege that happened in the past it might not fit. Connections' blogging capability could be used, but eventually a more structured approach with a mix of tags and meta data would be more appropriate. So we concluded to expand Lotus Connections existing services (Profiles, Bookmarks, Blogs, Communities, Activities) with a new service we will call "places". To get this new service we just need to add it to the main navigation and deploy Lotus Quickr with a customized template featuring the Connections navigation. The places will face on the different aspects of the transition (products, front-office, back-office, training etc.) and feature stories, interviews (podcasts/videocasts) and supporting documents. This is what we came up with: