Telligent Releases an Integrated Suite of Collaboration Tools with High Powered Metrics

Bill Ives writes about the announced offering by Telligent – stressing their market insights (integrators and integration needed) and subsequent focussing with their suite:

I have written a bit on the potential for new information silos within enterprise 2.0. Telligent recognizes this. Rob Howard said, “Telligent’s strategy is to provide a platform where social computing, enterprise technology and traditional communication come together to break down information silos and enhance measurability both inside and outside the organization.”  We discussed how tools should be independent of information and that Telligent does not attempt to replace tools such as email but allows you to work with them better in an integrated manner. You can drag and drop content from sources like YouTube into Telligent and add widgets from tools like Twitter in the same manner.

As Tom Davenport recently wrote you need both old school and new school capabilities (see Mixing Old and New School Communication). Tom referred to this as 1.5 with a sense of humor and said it is greater than 2.0. Tom wrote that asking which is better Web 1.0 or Web 2.0 is actually a false dichotomy. They complement each other.  I would agree. Enterprise 2.0 brings a new dimension but it does not replace many traditional enterprise apps anymore than TV replaced the radio or the telephone replaced in person conversation. Telligent has correctly recognized this and designed for integration. 

From the perspective of “collaborative performance” the extensive measurement tools and approaches they push are very interesting – we all know there’s a need for metrics (Telligent promises “buzz metrics” too, and while I doubt that they can really measure the informal buzz, it’s 1. a nice approach and 2. a unique selöling proposition for this suite).

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Introducing Open Atrium

I have kicked the tires of Open Atrium – an „Intranet in the Box“ lately. Pretty impressive package on the basis of Drupal, i.e. there’s blogs, a kind of wiki, calendars, to-do-lists and a microblogging-alike Shoutbox. And there’s a nice admin dashboard too.

More testing will follow as time permits …

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Harnessing Networks to Create Value and Identify New Opportunities

So they are moving now into an open architecture and creating a social network of their employees in other divisions, customers, and developers to join and basically understand the platform and start developing products and services on the platform. So I think companies should engage in these experiments. And assuming the experiments, hopefully, will work, they will learn from this and be able then to move and expand [the process] further into the firm.

Mike Gotta links to an interview with the authors of The Network Challenge: Strategy, Profit and Risk in an Interlinked World (Wharton School Publishing), Kleindorfer, Wind and Gunther and highlights a passage.

Seems this could be an interesting collection of essais, at least it’s interesting enough for me (yay, a paper with Colin Crook examining network affects against a background of complexity theory) – and it sounds a bit Enterprise 2.0 too (internal and external collaboration platforms to leverage the benefits of networking et al.)

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Socialtext Microblogging Appliance is Twitter in a box

As if the world needed more microblogging services we present the Socialtext Microbloggin Appliance, a rack server that basically builds out social networking and microblogging applications instantly inside an Intranet.

Hmm, I don’t know if I like the Twitter in a box approach – ok, everything stays behind the firewall, yet it’s not a bargain, making it harder to justify the spending. And consultants to make it all work and implemented aren’t included (puh 😉

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Enterprise 2.0 Buch – Fallstudien incl.

Unser Enterprise 2.0-BuchDas kündige ich ja sehr gerne an, Michael Koch und Alexander Richter von der Forschungsgruppe Kooperationssysteme haben mittlerweile die zweite Auflage ihres Enterprise 2.0-Buches erreicht – wobei Aktualisierungen und neue Entwicklungen mit aufgenommen wurden.

Ich darf auch verraten dass eine der neuen Fallstudien aus meiner Feder stammt, und darin u.a. die Vorteile von DokuWiki als unkomplizierte und ausbaufähige Lösung thematisiert werden …

Global Blogger Survey report

Short english summary: German PR company and consultants have done a study on blogger relations (this is a global report and results are published in English, “subpresentations” available). German language post though as I am loosely linked to the Munich based text 100 via a joint IBM project (and yes, I participated in the survey too).

German language post ahead:

Dies hier passt genau zu meinem zweiten Workshop – wenn es um Social Media Monitoring geht wird es sicher auch darum gehen wie sich Unternehmen zu Bloggern verhalten und positionieren. Dass Blogger durchaus Interesse an (Unternehmens-)informationen haben ist klar, wichtig ist aber dass die Spielregeln stimmen (ob Vodafones Aktivitäten dieser Woche hier stimmig sind überlasse ich der Einschätzung der geneigten Leserschaft).

Lesenswert sind auf jeden Fall auch die Überlegungen von  Björn Negelmann zum Strukturwandel in der PR, sprich der PR 2.0, u.a. zum notwendigen Paradigmenwechsel:

Diskutiert mal also den Aspekt der “Public Relations” bzw. der “Kommunikation” im Umfeld des Social Web, muss man zunächst den Paradigmenwechel verstehen, um dann die Maßnahmen vor diesem Hintergrund richtig gestalten zu können.

Hier aber zuerst die Ergebnisse der text100-Umfrage:

Und speziell auf Deutschland bezogen:

Check them out.

Teams’ knowledge use and performance (under stress)

Just a short note – check out  Heidi Gardner’s Harvard Business School working paper Feeling the heat: The effects of performance pressure on teams’ knowledge use and performance (pdf)

Why do some teams fail to use their members’ knowledge effectively, even after they have correctly identified each other’s expertise? This paper identifies performance pressure as a critical barrier to effective knowledge utilization. Performance pressure creates threat rigidity effects in teams, meaning that they default to using the expertise of high-status members while becoming less effective at using team members with deep client knowledge. Using a multimethod field study across two professional service firms to refine and test the proposed model, I  lso find that only the use of client-specific expertise (not the expertise of high-status members) enhances client-rated performance. This paper thus reveals a paradox affecting teams’ use of members’ knowledge: the more important the project, the less effective the team. This paper contributes to the emerging literature linking team-level expertise utilization (instead of just recognition) with performance outcomes and also adds a novel, team-level perspective to the literature on inter-firm relations.

This is close to being an organizational collaboration pathology – huh? Now, it’s clear that having some slack time to build up social capital is essential (for building up trust and more – we’re talking of forming, norming, storming phases in teams) while in reality teams don’t always get that time (it’s a fast-paced multi-project world after all).

But putting on the heat on teams with an overblown performance focus seems to aggravate effects we know by the name of group think (and the related fall-back to well-established patterns when the going gets rough). And group norms kill creativity:

Unfortunately groups only rarely foment great ideas because people in them are powerfully shaped by group norms: the unwritten rules which describe how individuals in a group ‘are’ and how they ‘ought’ to behave. Norms influence what people believe is right and wrong just as surely as real laws, but with none of the permanence or transparency of written regulations…the unwritten rules of the group, therefore, determined what its members considered creative. In effect groups had redefined creativity as conformity.

Now what role may social software play in this situation? I agree that just mimicking Xing or LinkedIn in the hope of supporting and facilitation intra-company knowledge networks is bound to fail (and more, it’s following a flawed paradigm, social networks in companies should be understood as emergent properties of this complex social system we call organization). Designing the knowledge environments (and tools) for smart and action-oriented workers tasked with creative jobs is not easy (and very dependent of actual context too), letting the connections between interdependent teams simply emerge is a challenge. Just think of the various relations we entertain to people not in our actual company network (freelancers, alumni, competitors and complementors, partners, …), these are complex systems too:

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