If you’re interested in organizational learning, or how a company or group improves its capacity to do great things through training, informal learning, or other mechanisms, check out this piece on the need for social networking technology in enterprise software, written by Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com. This is something I’ve believed in strongly for years. For my capstone project in my master’s program I even wrote some basic software to tie social networking elements into a closed network geared around organizational learning. I wish my explanation of the need for such software at the time would have been as nicely written as Mr. Benioff’s argument. The key point for me:

For years we’ve been reading about the potential for institutional memory to transform a corporation into a learning organization. But, have we seen it happen beyond very few unique organizations? A true paradigm shift occurs when the barriers of entry are removed for everyone. That is changing fast. With these new social models, there is a way to immediately leverage the knowledge of an organization. People with expertise and relevance are instantly looped in, can participate in the conversation, collaborate, and make contributions more simply than ever before. That will be the catalyst of this new productivity revolution—delivered through these new social enterprise platforms.

I’m curious to know more about how organizations who already get it are doing this sort of thing now. If you work at a socially-wired company or organization, or if you’ve used the social gears to drive a grassroots cause, and you happen to stumble upon this post, I’d like to know more about what you did.