frogpond

Intranet Innovation Awards

Patrick Lambe of Straits Knowledge points to the Intranet Innovation Awards, that are searching for new ideas and approaches to the design and delivery of intranets.

I think he’s right to ask for innovation in the right places – tweaking and optimizing overcome work processes won’t help. And yes, corporate intranets are more important than most CxOs realize:

Intranets are – where they work well – environments that service a variety of working practices and activities, attract participation, and foster coordination and collaboration across the enterprise.
[…]
Since work focus, work patterns, coordination needs and organisation structure change on an increasingly frequent basis, big, highly integrated homogeneous environments are just not adaptive or nimble enough. Intranets are increasingly becoming more flexible, evolving environments, becoming much more like an interdependent ecology of open applications talking to each other – whether they be workflow applications, calendaring, web content publishing, document management, blogs, wikis, media libraries, podcasting, staff directories, you name it. Some areas of the intranet will be quite stable and structured, some will be much more experimental, some will provide current awareness and content marketing on a daily basis.

Still, I wonder why effective collaboration with partners outside the corporation (and thus outside the “intranet”) is seemingly no issue. This does not feel right, when we know that distributed work processes (in virtual networks, business ecosystems, extended value nets etc.) become yet more important. For me, “tuning” and supplementing internal oriented intranets with more outward-oriented (corporate) social software like wikis is a smart move, that should be pondered in intranet innovation projects …

Corporate uses of Web 2.0 technologies

Andrew McAfee provides another short insightful roundup on corporate uses of web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging, social bookmarking etc. In short, use them e.g. for:

collaborative production of documents (and meaning, understanding, commitment as I would add)
build a corporate encyclopedia, a “Wikipedia” for corporate data
as all-purpose teamware
a mega-adaptive ‘war room’ for fast-changing situations
spreading knowledge … and searching widely
‘crowdsourcing,’ i.e. leveraging emergence by farming out tasks to a distributed crowd of people who decide individually and flexibly on what they want to work on

Wikipatterns, success factors and consulting

There’s another interesting article in the BusinessWeek feature on wikis in the enterprise, called “No Rest for the Wiki“, where short examples of corporate wikis, like e.g. Intels Intelpedia, are introduced.

Worthy to note is that these enterprise wikis started out as small maverick projects by enthusiastic proponents and evangelists, who attracted followers and traction by “word of mouth” and “giving good example”.

This resonates well with Wikipatterns, an initiative by Atlassian, makers of enterprise wiki Confluence. Wikipatterns collects and organizes common patterns and anti-patterns of wiki adoption in the enterprise. It supports wiki evangelists and wiki consultants alike, because the patterns are both generally applicable and because they help in focusing change management efforts and attention in implementation efforts. While we all know that motivating employees to contribute is an old question of people management and organizational management, wikis and other social software are putting up both new opportunities and new problems.

This is an interesting work area for social software consultants, because when companies don’t have the time (and organizational slack) to experiment, when internal wiki proponents have no (promotion and decision) power, and when manpower is lacking they can leverage their specialized knowledge and expertise.

Indeed, as a consultant my main job is in explaining to companies the hows and whys of wikis and their effective use in the enterprise, i.e. proposing adoption paths, planning implementation projects and helping to upstart and trigger wiki adoption. So guidelines, best practices and systematic sets of success factors help in the “selling” of wikis to firms, again both by internal proponents and by external consultants like me when called in to consult on wiki projects.

Moreover, I think that both bottom-up, grass-roots and management sponsored projects can profit from the collected wikipatterns. And as more and more collaboration initiatives are leaving “skunkworks-state” it becomes yet more important to know how to engage those willing to participate and those who hesitate. Again, implementation efforts that target broad internal adoption need a powerful set of tools.

But this is not all. Social software consulting in my mind also entails helping companies to embrace the collaborative nature of web 2.0, so that they can take advantage of what it offers. Hence it becomes clear that social software consultants must master a wider vision of wikis and social software, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 alike. Consultants must also reach across the fields of organizational change management, organizational design and strategy, because wiki usage is both happening in contexts and designed for tasks that are defined by organizational strategy. So creating the right environment for wikis is not restricted to some kind of change management and wiki uptaking coaching, but needs to understand and use principles, methods and tools of strategy-level consulting when due.

Let me give you just one example: strategies like Open Innovation and Mass Collaboration, where wikis and other social software can be used to facilitate collaboration. Consulting in this space may (and will) touch social software aspects, but the groundwork and basics are of an organizational (and strategic) nature. Lucky me, I am not a one-trick wiki pony, see some other areas of expertise.

Enterprise 2.0 is not about technologies, and not about wikis alone

What makes this BusinessWeek wiki feature outstanding is that it doesn’t restrict its approach on the technology.

Too often, people talk about social software in techno-gabberish, while we know that the main tasks are organization related and have more to do with change management, implementation and persuading people, i.e. finding promotors, followers, early adopters.

Supporting fitting organizational structures, through supportive management and coaching, maybe even rewards and benefit systems (I am no friend of this approach, yet, it has its merits), was not really discussed, but one could feel these issues lurking in the background in most articles.