It’s the people that are missing …

… in many discussions around the tools and methods of Enterprise 2.0, Social Software in the Enterprise or whatever you name it.

Especially intranet discussions are too often charaterized by a portal focus – or may I say obsession. When technology is our starting point, it’s no wonder that we care more for corporate memory, information management and systems, than actual users.

The people factor deserves more consideration, unless Enterprise 2.0 (or … you get the point) will fail again, much like technology focused KM efforts of old have.

Shifting mindsets from technology to people is hard, yet it’s essential, because it’s the creativity and motivation of people that drive innovation and knowledge usage – and they deserve to be supported.

Enterprise social software supports and builds upon connectivity and adaptivity (and lays out the groundwork for emergence), and thus leverages the complex systems nature of organizations to their advantage.

Enterprise 2.0 – Through the backdoor

Michael Schuster of System One offers another spin on adaption and implementation issues, the role that social networks play, the uptaking of social software and more:

How long are enterprises going to withstand the pressure from their employees that illegally install tools, use external services and setup things like wikis without caring about corporate security policies or the like? I hear from so many people who are not happy with the applications that they have, that it is very likely that those who are eager to work with efficient, slim tools are going to find a workaround and (even worse from a company viewpoint) introduce that to their colleagues and to other teams.

This sounds reminiscent of the maverick, bottom-up uses that bypass conventional IT structures (and governance alike), e.g. when employees actually use external tools like webmailers, as described in this article by the NYT. Well, people want to forward their work email to Webmail (so that they can access it from home, when doing extra work) anyway. Consequently we need policies that don’t interfere with the actual ways people work – and Enterprise 2.0 implementations must be well aware of both IT governance policies and workers needs.

Knowledge Management 2.0 (Again)

Eclectic Bill on the difference between Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management 2.0, triggered by this comment by David Weinberger in KMWorld:

[…] Web 2.0 is not a disruptive set of technologies but just the “continuous and incremental changes” as the Web has evolved in popularity and usage. The web has always been collaborative from the beginning and the new technologies just make it easier to collaborate.

[…] KM 1.0 was all about “managing and controlling information environments” while KM 2.0 is “bottom-up, participatory, rapid innovation, more mixing up and and mashing of information.” […] KM today is a decentralized group of methods and technologies that is very different from the IT-focused centralized group of applications.

He goes on expressing his concerns that

[…] KM 2.0 will suffer from being too-closely associated with the latest technology. Even though IT applications help enable KM, it is more than the software. You can practice much of KM without technology because it is people that create knowledge – not computers. This collaboration between people is what makes KM work. But with the focus on Web 2.0 and its collaborative technologies, KM 2.0 will be confused with the Web 2.0 tools. And as these tools become outdated or fail to live up to the hype, KM 2.0 will suffer much KM 1.0 suffered during the early 1990s. There is more to KM than the tools and the KM community needs to stress that point.

Yes, it’s about people, not about technologies … see my posts here and here for further evidence.

Blogs als Instrument der Unternehmenskommunikation

Martin Hiegl hat an der BA Stuttgart und damit quasi in meiner Nachbarschaft eine Studienarbeit im Bereich Wirtschaft zum Thema “Blogs als Instrument der Unternehmenskommunikation” geschrieben (pdf-download).

Das pdf ist überschaubar und bietet eine grundlegende Einführung in das Thema. Gut gefallen hat mir die Übersicht über die verschiedenen Einsatzarenen von unternehmensinternen Blogs, weniger gut dass die Einordnung von Blogs in den weiteren Kontext von unternehmensinterner Social Software zu kurz kommt. Das ist aber angesichts des Umfangs der Arbeit verständlich.

More on enterprise wikis

Some wiki links of late …

1. Socialtext Unplugged.

Socialtext Unplugged is an application within a single HTML file, which also means it is cross-platform. It downloads as a Zip file, but synching is through Socialtext’s Wiki Web Services.

Bob Sutor with excellent analysis on what this means for Office 2.0 …

That’s the wonderful thing about the future that Office 2.0 is nudging us towards: we already have the pieces! We may need some standards so we can make the different services work together better, but we’re on the right path.

2. Wikia announces OpenServing.

Wikia is launching a service offering free tools for people who want to build community websites. Interesting business model policy, letting the community sort out the business model 😉

FREE software, FREE bandwidth, FREE storage, FREE computing power, FREE content over the Internet, and GIVING AWAY 100% of the ad inventory and revenue to bloggers and website owners who partner with Wikia

and

Social change has accelerated beyond the original Wikipedia concept of six years ago. People are rapidly adopting new conventions for working together to do great things, and Wikia is a major beneficiary of that trend. OpenServing is the next phase of this experiment. We don’t have all the business model answers, but we are confident – as we always have been – that the wisdom of our community will prevail

Update: Stuart Froman focuses on the experimental free-flowing and adaptive approach Wikia’s following:

But if it’s experiments we want, then this is a good one. […] And will a sustainable business model follow?

Well, I would add that this setting may allow for the emergence of new businessmodels, where “emergence” is used in its complex systems sense, i.e. the emergence of patterns (business models) out of the interactions of independent agents … for some related ideas see my business model innovation and design blog.

3. Manuel Simoni notes challenges for wikis in the enterprise.

No Sense of Ownership: Information I put on a page could be edited away by tomorrow, and my pages seem to float in a boundary-less space beyond my personal control.
There are technical solutions to these problems (versioning and a personal dashboard, for example) but the feeling remains.
Unidentified ContributorsIt’s not immediately obvious who contributed what, which gives capitalists little incentive to contribute.
Again, there are technical (versioning) and social (ThreadMode) fixes, but they’re just that, fixes.
Shared State: As we move to an occasionally offline model of operation (e.g. Zimbra Offline client), where multiple users may edit the same page while all of them are offline, using a wiki with its simple-minded “all mixed up like Pasta Primavera” data model is asking for trouble.

Well, yes, see also 1. above for looming sharing and editing problems, where SocialText has given no answers yet.

Manuel proposes a system of intertwined weblogs, a collage approach to social software.

Still, I think wikis will have their place. So when people want to be recognized (and rewarded) for their contributions the way to go is a combination of blogs and wikis in an integrated enterprise 2.0 approach.

Applying Web 2.0 in the enterprise

Dion Hinchcliffe recounts a presentation by Bob Morgan, Vice President of the Chief Technology Office, American Express Technology on the Web 2.0 efforts at Amex, pointing out that.

major corporations are starting to seriously explore the use of Web 2.0 techniques in various aspects of their business

Amex is driving three initiatives combining Web 2.0 and SOA:
1) Improving the Customer Experience
2) Community and Collaboration
3) Simplicity and approachability

Note also that

figuring out how to leverage the positive aspects of the emerging best practices on the Web today, without eliminating the very benefit they provide, is one of the biggest challenges in providing a Web 2.0 “context” in the enterprise