Got a question? We all know getting fast answers is as simple as searching the Internet, or as we say, "Googling."

Our kids, though, have carved out a unique way of gathering information: They ask their peers. Not the baggy-pants crowd they're hanging out with at the mall, their online community cultivated through the likes of Facebook and My Space, You Tube and Flickr, where your status is determined by the number of cool "friends" linked to a given individual.

From the hottest bands to fashion to faux pas, their "friends" are bound by shared values, not geography.

And what they can teach business - especially large multinationals with diverse expertise and tens of thousands of employees spread around the globe - will surprise you, says Don Rippert, chief technology officer at Accenture, a global consulting company based in Reston, Va.

Don Rippert

At risk of stating the obvious, he says, that teens have no idea of a world without the web, nor can they imagine life without Web 2.0 - that mass of user generated and shared content or applications like MSN or Hotmail.

It defines their generation in the way Woodstock defined the Boomers, but it's not all fun and games, says Rippert.

There's some serious learning for business here.

"Corporate knowledge management sites lag behind the services teens take for granted," he says, pointing to the way most corporations store documents and knowledge.

Until now, the standard practice has been to simply warehouse documents and other files on servers and eventually shift them into long-term storage - usually a tapedrive in a data warehouse in the middle of nowhere where land is cheap.

That's the equivalent of throwing money out the window, Rippert says, because that knowledge should be shared and accessible.

Take the average global conglomerate, he says. It probably has a head office in Europe or North America, with other local offices around the world operating in several languages with a headcount just above or below 100,000.

Within that employee population, there's an astounding collection of knowledge, but it's fragmented and not indexed.

It depends entirely on someone knowing someone else who is working or has worked on a similar issue, or has seen a report, presentation or video on the challenge another employee is seeking to resolve.

Videos, especially, and PowerPoint decks, says Rippert, are a wealth of knowledge, but how do you connect the dots? The answer is simple and doesn't require reinventing the wheel: Ask the kids.

David Gilmour

Web platforms such as de.licio.us.com - which allows users to tag content they find online and make those tags available to others who may be interested in the same areas - are a prime example.

What if employees started tagging their documents to make them friendly toward internal search engines? What if they created blogs for internal access that discussed their day-to-day progress on projects and allowed them to ask their fellow employees around the world for input or support?

And what if teams created wikis - the web version of collaborative knowledge where a subject is described and dissected collectively and shared internally? (The best known example is probably Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.)

That's the approach IBM is taking with its 350,000 employees in 170 countries.

The knowledge base is overwhelming and the challenge in trying to share and disseminate information, mountainous.

So, a couple of years ago when blogging started to become popular, IBM developed an internal tool to allow employees to blog about their projects as a way of sharing information. At first, there were only a few writing here and there. Searching for information wasn't that difficult.

But over time, says Jay Subrahmonia, software group strategy director, advanced customer solutions at IBM's Toronto labs, other ways of tagging and organizing the blogs became necessary because the trickle of words grew into a raging torrent.

Again, IBM turned to the Internet where social networking among billions of users had given birth to the practice of tagging - adding keywords to blogs and text - and the development of wikis allowing teams to collaborate, write and edit content collectively.

In mid-2006 it became apparent that the wealth of knowledge being generated by IBM internally and how it was being managed was a pretty good business tool, said Subrahmonia, and a team of developers was assigned to grow it further.

The result is the Innovation Factory, a suite of Web 2.0 tools such as forums, wikis, blogs, polls and surveys that are easy to set up and deploy for large-scale enterprises, either internally or externally.

Coincidentally, finding the first customer for the suite wasn't hard.

U.S. mobile phone carrier Sprint had approached IBM looking for some tools to run market research and to solicit instant feedback from customers about features and services it wanted to bring to market.

"Typically, it takes up to 24 months for a carrier to bring a service to market," says Subrahmonia. "So they wanted to know which ones their customers were most interested in."

One of the features of the Innovation Factory allows for instant creation of virtual focus groups - customers and consumers who opt-in to offer their opinions and make suggestions about goods and services.

Traditionally, gathering such groups is a long and expensive process.

Participants must be recruited by age, sex and other demographics, gathered at a time and place, and then walked through a series of questions. The responses have to be transcribed, collated and analysed.

Online, the process is immediate and interactive, and setting up a group is as simple as setting up an e-mail distribution list.

"We did a proof of concept in October and then rolled it out to Sprint, working with them to develop it further," says Subrahmonia, noting Innovation Factory is now available to all IBM customers.

"We think it really will have traction in the telecommunications industry and media and entertainment."

The point, she says, is that many companies want to be innovative and harness Web 2.0 concepts, but find their own IT department is usually fixated on day-to-day issues such as securing the network, configuring users' desktops, laptops and mobiles, and maintaining servers and storage. It's hard for them to find resources to develop new tools.

It isn't a giant leap for the generation of web kids poised to enter the workforce, as Rippert points out.

They already operate within a social network.

What needs to be done, he says, is to align old-school corporate tools with today's technologies.

Modelling corporate directories such as Facebook pages, for example, is a simple first step.

"It's a much richer experience than the average corporate directory provides," says Rippert, noting Accenture has implemented a number of these innovations in its internal knowledge-management systems and is already seeing the benefits for its 146,000 employees around the world.

Collaborative tagging, video indexing and a social network for global employees are some of the early manifestations of the approach to helping Accenture staff find the information they need, collaborate and develop content together.

Finally, marrying the power of search engines such as Google with software that acts like a personal agent - a bot - may also be a magic key in unlocking corporate knowledge, says David Gilmour, president and CEO of Tacit Software, a California startup among whose investors are RBC Technology Ventures Inc.

"Knowledge management, to date, has been an embarrassing failure," says Gilmour.

"Using Web 2.0 user-generated content is a great way to share, but the problem is that with everyone writing a blog or working on wikis, the information generated becomes overwhelming."

What Tacit is developing and is in beta or user-testing stage, is Illumio - a Harry Potteresque moniker for a bit of technology magic.

In the public world, Illumio is free and a sophisticated version of something like a list-serv or e-mail loop where members sign up to circulate comments and questions of common interest.

Illumio fans out to the group (users must opt in) searching hard drives and noting subjects they most often write about, read, e-mail or surf online. Anyone with a question can ask Illumio, which then matches it to other users in the group.

However, says Gilmour, the trick is that Illumio doesn't immediately return a list of possible matches as Google does. Instead, it uses a Dutch auction process to privately query with a pop-up the most likely person with the information.

"That person then has the option not to respond," he says. "Illumio will then go to the next likely person and so on until it gets a response."

The process is anonymous so that the answer-seeker has no idea how many people within the group have ignored the request, only that they got an answer or didn't. The public version is free and the corporate offering starts at $5 per month per user, but drops with volume.

"It's a way of getting around the bottleneck of content," says Gilmour. "There's no server to maintain, it sits on the user's PC and it's completely anonymous so there are no privacy issues."

(Ian Harvey can be reached at harvey@businessedge.ca)