Accenture gets into Intranet 2.0

Via IT Business, an insight into Accenture’s efforts to introduce web 2.0 concepts into their corporate intranet:

[…] borrowing ideas from online services such as Facebook, De.licio.us, YouTube, Wikipedia and Second Life to remake Accenture’s employee intranet.

Just this month, Accenture went live with a new global employee network that looks much like Facebook, the popular web site on which mostly young people share pictures and information about their interests.

Accenture also has visual, context-assisted search capabilities already up and running. […] picked up on the idea of allowing every user to tag content as the De.licio.us web site does, thus creating a co-operative way of classifying material that benefits all users.

[…] And there will be wikis – co-operatively edited Web pages – to allow anyone in the company to publish material for internal use. “If you make it easy for your employees to publish information, they’ll publish information,”

[…] “The younger employees carry it,” he says – they will be the first to publish on wikis, to tag content and so on. Others will follow as they see the value, though Rippert adds that some of the new capabilities, such as improved search functions, will replace the old way of doing things and employees will have little choice about using them.

I wonder what other elements will be introduced next. Social bookmarking would seem to be a logical next step, or perhaps internal blogs?

Emergent wiki uses in organization

Chris Fletcher on pragmatic wiki adoption, adding to Bill Ives take (“Creating Successful Niche Content Spaces on the Web“):

[wikis] work best when there is a specific business need – getting teams to collaborate around a specific business issue or building community around a service offering is a great way to get individuals to start to experiment with how the wiki can be used

Straight to the point. He also argues against big bang approaches of wiki deployment, something that I can understand very well, and argue for all the time. In fact one big advantage of wikis is their capacity for emergence, i.e. letting patterns of usage evolve over time, which is not really leveraged when we install wikis in a pre-defined top-down way. Interestingly, betting on emergence does not collide with the demand for “specific business needs”, when these

  • only define a starting point for wiki usage
  • don’t restrict extensions and cross-theme wiki-linking
  • are (constantly) evaluated and adapted

Vortrag AK Wissensmanagement

Mein Vortrag für das Meeting des Arbeitskreises Wissensmanagement:

Heute abend, 18:30, bei der MFG Medien- und Filmgesellschaft Baden-Württemberg mbH im Bosch Areal, Stuttgart.

Podcast on Motorolas wiki use

Dan Bricklin writeups a podcast (mp3) with Toby Redshaw of Motorola on their continued wiki use. Sound quality is not that good, it’s a telephone call recording after all, but it’s OK for me.

We learn about Motorola’s internal usage of wikis and blogs, the ways of implementation, actual usage in the organization, the role and usefulness of wiki gardeners and yet more on success factors :

They prune old and unused content, sometimes having a blog that lasts just a very short time. They work hard to keep it all fresh and up to date. They have knowledge champions in various areas who help do this. He feels these “domain owners” are an important part of facilitating the “quality” of the information and its organization. This is internally oriented, which has everybody with the same mission of advancing the company’s goals and under the same governance to keep out bad behavior, etc. This is not Wikipedia on the public web.

I also like this take on the further ways of Enterprise 2.0 concepts as they make inroads into all corporate environments (given that Motorola has probably a high geek-factor in its workforce anyway):

Toby sees an evolution towards “enterprise mashups” with business process management, enterprise information management systems, structured data management systems, data warehouses, and wikis. Process management data that shows a choke point or other problem in a process can link back automatically to a search of wiki data to find prior material relating to that situation and even identify individuals to be called in. They are trying to use both structured and unstructured information.

And there’s more interesting stuff, worthy 45 minutes.

Information technology and productivity

In the NYT, this report claiming that computers (can) give big boosts to productivity.

Money spent on computing technology delivers gains in worker productivity that are three to five times those of other investments, according to a study being published today.

Well, the study (pdf) was initiated by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, which is in turn supported by companies like IBM and Cisco, so this outcome should come as no surprise.

Anyway, an interesting approach, even when this calls for more profound research, e.g. to differentiate between the different kinds and sources of these productivity gains. And I have no doubt that Peter Drucker’s famous aphorism (and the challenges it poses) are not really met …

“To make knowledge work productive will be the great management task of this century, just as to make manual work productive was the great management task of the last century.”

Peter Drucker, cited again …

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.