On time with the BusinessWeek feature on wikis in the enterprise IBM’s ShortCuts Podcast has another take with Luis Suarez, who offers tips on becoming a wiki evangelist (remember this picture of another evangelist …). Here’s the mp3.
What are some key factors in supporting and nurturing a wiki? How does one launch a socially collborative web experience and keep it from failing? In this episode, Shortcuts knowledge management expert Luis Suarez offers tips on becoming a wiki evangelist.
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.
Wikis are now making their way into corporations where they are used as collaborative software to handle such tasks as project management, tech support, research and development, event planning and customer relationship management
Hier die Übersichtsseite (“CEO Guide to Technology”), darin u.a. das:
Nicht zu vergessen ein Podcast-Interview mit Andrew McAfee von Rachel King (mp3), in dem er neben verschiedenen Einsatz- und Anwendungsszenarien auch Aspekte der Einführung anspricht.
Sind Sie am Einsatz von Wikis in ihrem Unternehmen interessiert? Sprechen Sie mich an.
… or so Forrester Research holds in this report:
When knowledge management (KM) practices, tools, and architectures burst onto the scene in the mid-1990s, they looked a lot like the old economy businesses that built them, hierarchical and workflow-driven. Now, Social Computing tools are flattening those architectures and extending the reach of KM well beyond the walls of the conventional enterprise to touch customers and business partners. Information and KM professionals are becoming knowledge facilitators, and they must get smart fast to capitalize on this trend. Although disruptive, Social Computing will transform KM, shifting the emphasis from repositories, which are hard to build and maintain, to more intuitive, tacit knowledge sharing. Social Computing is becoming the new KM, moving it from an often too academic exercise into the real world of people sharing knowledge and expertise with each other naturally, without even thinking about it.
Overall I am glad that Forrester Research is pushing this specific application of social software, as this is good news for social software and knowledge management consultants like frogpond.
But I would elaborate on their argument, basically because when many past knowledge-management projects and initiatives did not work out as planned, they did so rarely because methods or tools lacked.
For social software to turn out successful, it can’t be sufficient to ponder, propose and promote (new) methods and tools.
What is also needed is appropriate groundwork and background, i.e. paradigms and principles that guide the selection and usage of methods and tools, and insight into the nature of complex organizational systems. Emergence, connectivity and adaptivity are traits of organizational systems that are supported and leveraged by social software – good for organizational knowledge management but not restricted to it.
If you’re eager to know more and are looking for social software support and consulting assistance, contact me.
Stewart Mader offers insight and adoption advice for enterprise 2.0 projects. I appreciate his take on the subject, especially about allowing emergence:
[…] If you begin using a wiki in your organization and users start doing something differently, don’t stop them, and don’t just let them – encourage them! What they’re doing is probably better then the previous way, and by encouraging them, you’re building loyalty to the new tool that increases its chances of success. […]
Yes, and it’s a good idea to keep it simple, until seeing the patterns that evolve, and then supporting these. This calls for management to let go of its acquired (and hard-earned they are!) competencies and mindset. Yet, modifying deeply ingrained traits is hard.
So, in the light of social software in the enterprise it’s not primary the people, but the architects of organizational collaboration that need to change. This expands the common understanding of change management, and makes clear that enterprise 2.0 implementation efforts must not only address the primary users of the tools.
Jack Vinson has some thoughts on an issue Jeffrey Philipps brought up (and that was discussed yesterday evening in a local meeting of enterprise 2.0 folks I attended):
People don’t bother defining their processes because they can’t see how it matters. Maybe they don’t believe they have an impact on the overall business. Or they are trying to protect their “turf” by being purposefully opaque. Or they’ve had a dozen other improvement efforts come through and there has been no real impact on the bottom line.
[…]
Understanding processes is helpful, but it is just as important to know which processes need to be understood. This is a common complaint of flavor-of-the-day programs: the idea is applied to everything in the hopes that it will do some good. It makes much more sense to look at the business and find the few places to apply an improvement that will actually make a difference to the business.
I’d add that
– neat orderly processes are not that ubiquitous and
– that they aren’t as important as most people think.
Especially knowledge (or innovation) work processes can’t be standardized (granted you can support parts and pieces of these processes with standard workflow gear), so trying to manage them into (computerized) workflows and all is not feasible and no worthwhile goal, whereas more freeform tools and concepts like wikis can be easily adapted to variable requirements – and even allow (process) solutions to emerge from within the organizational system.
If you want to know more and are looking for social software support and consulting assistance, contact me.
Here’s a lengthy piece from Information Week on Enterprise 2.0, based on a study of 250 business technologists on the merits of going web 2.0 in the enterprise. It holds that business technology people are concerned about the security aspects of Enterprise 2.0 offerings.
Well, yes, compliance, due diligence, compatibility with IT governance and integration into existing infrastructure are valid concerns, and constant topic in my discussions with colleagues and fellow enterprise 2.0 folks.
But overall the article is not too negative about the prospects of enterprise 2.0, because it shows that the concept is gaining traction while being aware that these issues must be dealt with. So I have no doubt that more and more IT departments will start to facilitate the use of “2.0”-tools and concepts, if only because Enterprise 2.0 is essential for extended value net organizations:
It’s a new architecture defined by easier, faster, and contextual organization of and access to information, expertise, and business contacts – whether co-workers, partners, or customers. And all with a degree of personalization sprinkled in.
Yet,
[there’s] this tension between the IT department that wants to have this orderly, planned infrastructure, and you’ve got end users out there experimenting with all these different collaboration tools.
Susan Scrupski tracks some discussions in this field, i.e. the role of CIOs, of IT departments etc.
Equally interesting is Mike Gottas take on the article here.