IBM bringing Web 2.0 to corporate workers

IBM is set today to make a big push into the Web 2.0 world by unveiling a team collaboration product, social computing software and a suite of tools for building Web mashups, see Computerworld’s article here.

[…] unveiling a team collaboration product, social computing software and a suite of tools for building Web mashups.

As part of a new “Web 2.0 Goes to Work” initiative, the IBM tools will bring popular consumer Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis and social networks to the enterprise, […] The new software should help companies more easily brainstorm and collaborate with partners and customers about business content

[…] Lotus Quickr 8 team collaboration tool helps companies use blogs, wikis and team space templates to share business documents and access libraries through plug-ins […]

[…] IBM today also announced that Lotus Connections is now available.

The Connections tool includes Web 2.0 components like bookmarking and support for social communities

[…] In addition, IBM introduced Info 2.0, a new suite of tools for customizing and linking Web and enterprise data into mashups

While one might argue that this portfolio of tools and suites is too complex and thus distracting, I think that it’s more or less a reflection of the impossibility to design “solutions” with “one true architecture”. What’s needed is a toolbox whose contents can be flexibly combined and adapted. IBM’s efforts are no “out of the box solution” anyway, which is basically good news for consultants in the social software space – remember it’s not about technologies or tools, it’s about organizations and people.

Wiki Wednesday in Stuttgart

Cedric und ich hatten die Idee schon länger, nun machen wir Nägel mit Köpfen: Wir organisieren den ersten Wiki Wednesday in Stuttgart.

Vorläufiger Veranstaltungsort ist das Vinum im Stuttgarter Literaturhaus (Bosch Areal, Nähe Liederhalle). Den Termin werden wir in den nächsten Tagen festlegen … ein Mittwoch wird es sicher sein.

Wer Interesse an der Teilnahme hat, kann sich hier in die Teilnehmerliste eintragen bzw. mir eine Nachricht senden.

Enterprise social software adoption …

Dennis McDonald lays out some of the points he’s picked for his consulting in the social software space:

Importance of “viral” promotion (i.e., no drumbeating from top executives — let the users progress on their own).

Importance of making infrastructure available throughout the organization as a standard set of tools.

Ability of social media to make up for some of the natural limitations of large meetings (e.g., less outspoken people tend to do less well in open meeting settings and may not have the same disincentives to participate when using social media).

Natural emergence of experts.

Recognition that knowledge management and knowledge sharing are critical to innovation.

Recognition that creative people are what differentiates one company from another given the comparability of physical and financial assets among competitors.

Need to occasionally prune and archive inactive material in order to to keep things “fresh.”

I like his take so much, especially when he touches on this big overlap between innovation and social software – that’s my line of thinking and my inspiration (see BMID and frogpond).

Web 2.0 changing decision making processes within organizations

More on Chambers keynote by the people of Avenue A | Razorfish, pointing out his argument that decision making processes (at least at Cisco …) were changed and accelerated:

And when talking about web 2.0 [Chambers] specifically drew attention to social networking as changing decision making processes within organizations.
[…] Chambers emphasized that social networks are changing businesses making them less hierarchical and more network oriented.

Well, yes, strengthening (and leveraging) social networks via social software may facilitate this, decision making can be accelerated (and be more distributed, democratized, deconstructed, diversified, …).

In fact, the main change effect is not acceleration (but the change effects in brackets …).

Alas, be warned, your results may vary, social networking in the enterprise is not “easy”. One reason is that this is not a technology problem (with some kind of tech answer), but a people problem. Supplementing organizational hierarchies and “command and control” decision structures with free-form collaboration and teamwork approaches needs some serious thinking before “kicking-off these projects”, taking into account that this calls for broad implementation approaches, lead and energized by skillful managers, and more …

Then (and only when …) we employ freeform social software and enterprise 2.0 concepts we can ease implementation, like when we leverage bottom-up mechanisms that are already in place, and allow for the emergence of usage and networking patterns that reflect and support the actual informal networks that exist in the organization anyway.

Social software may enter the corporate world quite naturally in the end …

No intranet? Great!

Lately I’ve had a lot of discussions on the ways of getting awareness for social software in companies (large and small). As noted before this is no easy sell or an easy subject to begin with. Yet the needs are obvious, people are not satisfied with the existing ways of collaboration …

For the companies that are waking up to the importance of helping their people deal with all the information overload (for their productivity) and capture, generate and leverage knowledge some collected articles on knowledge work, enterprise 2.0 and infrastructure:

Here, e.g. Lars Plougmann holds that having no intranet is an opportunity. Yes, wikis are beginning to achieve main stream adoption, all in all embedded in a wider trend where social software of all kinds are getting adopted:

“Great opportunity. Don’t get a traditional intranet.”

The concept of an intranet is a great idea. Making all relevant content accessible to everybody in one place. But many companies’ intranets suffer [from too many design/implementation/usage/… faults]

Lars advises to leverage the new social tools and build an open intranet:

An open intranet is one where any user can create a new page and every page has a nice friendly Edit button on it. Anybody within the organisation who wants to update or add information is empowered to do so.

Interesting comments as well, like this one:

[…] how I would start an intranet [for a small knowledge-worker organization] if I was doing so from scratch (an enviable position to be in).

I recommended they use a wiki; with only 35 people in the potential community and no KM resources, a traditional intranet is unlikely to fly whereas they’ll be able to replicate the basics with a wiki quickly and cheaply; for their business purposes, where sharing and developing fast changing ideas is essential, a wiki will deliver 80% of what they need.

and

[…] I think we’ll see wikis complement intranets by providing a truly interactive segment to intranet sites […]

Another article I noted appeared in E-Commerce News, pointing out new as a service-offerings and some interesting cases of unconventional intranet design and implementation after laying out the case for more collaboration and user-centered implementation:

[…] intranets can be installed with a one-size-fits-all application, an industry-specific turnkey intranet application or delivered as a hosted offering similar to tradition ASP products.

[…] not all companies are eager to implement the new technologies that are redesigning the options available in traditional intranets.

[…] Some intranet products have a focus on wikis, he said. Another trend he has observed is a rush for companies to support what workers were asking for. Clearly, the most flexible intranets are those designed with Web 2.0 functionality in mind.

[…] “The whole thing behind the new intranet is expanding collaboration by opening it up to the entire company. […] The original idea for an intranet was to share knowledge in closed departments. People are now realizing a larger need to spread information within the company, he said. Technology today has made it easier for corporate executives to do this.

“We are now seeing a power shift in companies over how information is used. Historically, people in organizations couldn’t share ideas. Now, blogging within a company creates followers and inter-reactions”

One Reason Why Knowledge Management Fails

Well, comes at no surprise, via Mike Gotta:

[…] blogs, wikis, social networking – none of this matters if companies treat people poorly and worse – institutionalize such actions.

and

With all the talk about Enterprise 2.0 and the resurgence of knowledge management, we tend to forget that employees are influenced (in terms of attitude, behavior, engagement) by both the macro messages that a company sends to its workers as well as the micro messages that come from a worker’s day-to-day management channel.

Yes, clearly not all organizations are ready for the roll-out of social software of any kind. So techno-crazy-high-flying expectations about social softwares impact on organizations should be seen critically, as Tom Davenport rightfully notes.

Then, knowledge cannot be conscripted, it can only be volunteered, and people know more than they can say. So caring and thinking about change management and ways of implementation is really essential … ever considered “adding” (social software sphere) change management consultants like me to your implementation efforts?