IT professionals have to face the fact that social networking is no longer just the domain of families and friends trying to stay in touch with each other or businesses trying to reach out with enhanced customer intimacy. It is emerging as a potential killer app within IT teams striving for continual service improvement, collaborative effort and efficiencies in the way knowledge is retained and shared.

Remember knowledge management (KM)? In the 1990s, KM emerged as a way to collect and share expertise across a company. Employees would fill out profiles for a database about their skills and knowledge. Colleagues could query the system to find the best person to help with a project.

With a diverse business unit portfolio that includes direct mail, call centres and electronic document management, Salmat CIO David Hackshall is working hard to instil a culture of collaborative knowledge management at the company and turn innovation into efficiency.

Your book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, challenges the value of crowdsourcing. What's wrong with the hive mind on the Internet?

Collaborative editing of Web documents has brought a new dimension to enterprise knowledge management. The architecture that made Wikipedia famous can now be applied to internal processes. And because of the long association with open source projects many of the most popular wikis are themselves open source. Here are five open source wikis to keep an eye on.