The future is Web 2.0 is collaboration …

… says John Chambers, CEO of Intel calling for businesses to increase knowledge worker productivity by implementing Web 2.0 social software but also by fostering mashups and virtual conferencing.

Here’s a video clip of Chambers Network + Interop keynote. It’s nicely edited and a convincing speech (“preaching the gospel”), so worth a look.

Yet one has to be aware that Chambers is betting on virtual conferencing and presence and aims to attract corporate interest onto Ciscos (WebEx-powered) collaboration approach. Keep that in mind when watching the video and when pondering the future of virtual networked collaboration …

For my part I am reserved whether video is really the killer application among the collaboration tools. Requiring synchronous presence of distributed collaborators is both costly and unnecessary most of the time (think more meetings …) whereas tools for virtual distributed collaboration like wikis are a low-cost approach that can be tailored to the actual needs (think more flexibility and serendipity …).

Interested in implementation of social software for collaboration? To learn more about my hands-on consulting approach contact me …

Interview with Ross Mayfield

Paul Dunay interviewed Ross Mayfield on wikis and published it as a podcast. You can’t download the audio file, but you can listen to it via a flash player.

I like this way of presentation, as it shows the cut marks of the recording and allows to skip forward and backward in the TOC:

Start podcast 00:00:00
Enterprise 2.0 defined 00:00:28
First Enterprise 2.0 deployment 00:02:07
How to Implement a Wiki 00:02:46
SAP’s Wiki implementaion 00:04:55
External marketing Wiki example 00:06:06
The Best Way to rollout a Wiki 00:08:13
How to build Adoption of your Wiki 00:11:55
What is the typical first project to start a Wiki? 00:14:59
How to get more info on Wikis 00:15:48

This interview touches also a lot of stuff that I layed out in my presentation here. No wonder I recommend both to anyone interested in social software for the enterprise …

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

Wiki Workplace

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams in BusinessWeeks wikinomics series on the “Wiki Workplace”, i.e. online collaboration and decentralized knowledge collection, refinement and distribution. Besides, the article notes some examples of good corporate use, e.g. by companies like Xerox, IBM (see here for more on Innovation Jams) and (again) Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.

Thanks in part to younger workers, more companies are using social computing tools to aid collaboration and to foster innovation and growth.
[…]
The information and communication technologies that are transforming media, culture, and the economy are also reshaping how companies and employees function. New social computing tools such as wikis and blogs put unprecedented communication power in the hands of employees.

I would hold that this is no question of age, but of disposition, i.e. willingness to participate, to share and to commit ourselves, it’s a people issue from the start, it’s a big task, yet the goal is worthwhile:

Clear goals, structure, discipline, and leadership in the organization will remain as important as ever and perhaps more so as self-organization and peer production emerge as organizing principles for the workplace. The difference today is that these qualities can emerge organically as employees seize the new tools to collaborate across departmental and organizational boundaries, and, yes, “the power of human capital” can be unleashed.

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.

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

Social Computing Upends Past Knowledge Management Archetypes

… 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.