Gotta wrote:

In some organizations that are highly competitive, or live in a world of sensitive intellectual property – there may be barriers to the type of open and transparent sharing that makes expertise easily discoverable. In “unhealthy cultures”, or when job longevity is a concern, people may believe that they are over-sharing what might be one asset that keeps them around. In environments that are “need to know” – information silos may prevent the type of lateral connections social environments might promote.

That is, of course, true at some organizations, especially large ones. For that reason, expertise location must be tied closely to the flow of other work-based technologies. It also needs to be in line with a pragmatic privacy model that makes people comfortable to share expertise based on the realities of their company’s culture and practices.

The first onset of social software — those “Facebook for the enterprise” implementations — often failed because vendors and practitioners at the time wrongly believed that everyone would visit a static-looking social networking profile and update information about their expertise. Over time, we learned a better way to get them to share expertise was through the actions they take throughout the day, and automatically pump that information onto their profiles. Activity Streams have been vital in this effort. If you constantly edit a page titled, “Product Safety,” someone in marketing putting together new packaging labels will know you’re the person to meet with as they put together materials for a launch.

But that doesn’t fully address Mike’s point that some people might not even want to share that much, and my general response to that sentiment is that those employees will find their days numbered.

The reason for their eventual departure will be purely economic, and not related to the technology itself or any kind of “evangelism” on the part of us social nerds. Companies that don’t embrace greater transparency inside their organizations will react slower to change and lose business to their competitors. If you’re a sales person who decided to horde critical information away in your e-mail, you might get away with it once or twice or even a few times. But eventually, you or a colleague will lose a big piece of business as a result. If this becomes a frequent occurrence, your VP of sales will either fire you or demand that you have a central place to share information. This phenomenon, again, is why I firmly believe line of business executives are emerging as the best champions of social software. They live these pain points and see the need to eliminate such political nonsense inside their organizations.

As my colleague Alan Lepofsky often tells me, in the past, people believed that knowledge was power. Today, power comes in sharing knowledge — to gain a better understanding of business and each other.

That’s not a wishy-washy social argument; it’s purely a business one. The employees who share and communicate openly not only are able to make better decisions based on the feedback they get, they ultimately end up looking like confident leaders — not digital paper-pushers who play God with who to include in a CC field.

The other critical element for expertise location inside companies lies in embracing a pragmatic privacy model. It helps fight cultural resistance. If you’re a CFO who has expertise in both finance and operations, then you rightly want to share certain bits of expertise with certain groups. For example, if you update a piece of content called “Mergers & Acquisitions,” you need to feel confident that any activity or update about that information in a social system would only be visible and accessible to a particular set of people. But when you edit a wiki page for “setting better supply chain practices,” you might want to publish that to a larger audience.

Sure, people will still hold on to information, and company cultures never change overnight. But I firmly believe those who don’t adapt will be naturally phased out over time by the pressures of their respective markets.

Update: In our discussions following this post on Twitter, Mike rightly noted that I didn’t address the other concerns he laid out about expertise sharing. They aren’t just the cultural ones, which I largely focused on this post. But also there are issues around accessibility, ownership, and time (among others he listed), as well as compliance, IP, etc.  Anyway, needless to say, make sure to read his whole post if you can.

The answer to the question is complex, and it’s increasingly becoming more pragmatic: You must start with LOBs if you want a social software implementation that derives meaningful business value, but you need to involve IT if you want the technology woven into the fabric of your company’s long-term architecture.

Early on in the process, LOBs unquestionably make the best champions for enterprise social software because their pain points are so plain to see. They live them everyday. A sales team loses a deal when it didn’t communicate with the right people in marketing. An engineering group lets down an existing customer because they didn’t solve her problem or question fast enough. By not having a place to ask questions openly, share expertise, and find the best people and information to do their jobs, these employees missed out on key business opportunities. The detrimental effects of these broken communication and collaboration processes cause LOB heads to recognize the merits of social software faster than most. They become the best advocates to find social software that helps them solve these specific business challenges.

But IT becomes an important player, too, especially at large companies. Obviously, they help ensure best practices around administration and security. However, since some software as a service (SaaS) offerings have matured to the point that they can handle those functions just as well, the more important role IT will play comes in the effort to make older, traditional enterprise apps social — by integrating them with the LOB’s social software platform of choice.

This middleground approach of LOB champions, coupled with involvement from IT at the appropriate times, has unfortunately not been embraced widely in the Enterprise 2.0 market. Many have opted for one extreme or the other. On one hand, you have those who ignore IT by providing free apps that require a company to pay just to get control of the domain and accounts that their employees signed up for, and traded corporate data over, without permission. That is not a freemium model; it’s a SaaS sales by extortion model.

The other model is just as ugly and even more expensive: A traditional IT-centric roll out. Most often, this social software was built with developers rather than end-users in mind. They try to forcefit new technologies into an old collaboration model, while completely ignoring open Web standards that ensure these applications can hook into others in a vendor agnostic environment. Worse, since LOBs don’t drive the selection and implementation process, you risk deploying software that they will never use to solve their business challenges. As Gartner pointed out, 70 percent of these implementations fail, and it’s really no wonder why.

So my advice is to strive for the middleground. The risk is lower, and the benefits will be both immediate and long-lasting.