frogpond

Four key design qualities that are essential for Enterprise 2.0 success

… according to the Burton Group, who hold that

the growing business focus on innovation and growth, coupled with nontraditional workplace expectations from next-generation employees, are forcing organizations to look at Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) as more than a catchphrase

Mike Gotta is cited, like here:

Business strategists are rethinking the fundamentals of work – how work gets done – how work should be organized – the culture necessary to catalyze innovation – and the workplace environment necessary to attract and retain the best talent. These trends are transforming past assumptions about how to approach collaboration and knowledge management efforts

Check out their report (“Enterprise 2.0: Harnessing the Complexity of Technology, Culture, and Change“, free registration may be necessary) for more insight into the four design qualities (Personal Value, Emergent, Communal, Platform Centric). While I don’t like the trend towards neologisms in consultanese, Mike Gotta seems to be spot on …

There’s value in the (intranet) mess

I like this David Weinberger ( here’s another interview with him) analysis of corporate intranets:

So the intranet at your organization is outdated—far behind that of the actual Internet. It’s marked by bad navigation. There are aging documents and old newsletter articles that belong in an archive. Maybe there’s a search engine, but if so that search engine only looks for materials in one department—not companywide.

Wading through your intranet is not only time consuming, it’s demoralizing. It’s a time waster, and a waste of the knowledge employees have accrued. This needn’t be the case.

While it’s obvious that most companies don’t really leverage the potentials of their intranets, I want to make it really clear that approaching this from a “just add more content and help people digest that information” perspective is just a little bit too tempting and won’t take you far. “Embrace the chaos wherever you are” is no solution in itself – we need to focus on the emergence of structures, and we need to figure out how the pieces fit together.

An Inside Out perspective

Tracking down the presentations from last weeks Intranet 2.0 Forum in Zürich I also checked out the blog (called Inside out) of Richard Dennison, Intranet and Channel Strategy Manager at British Telecom, which I can easily recommend – a blog with a tag line as his must be good (see for yourself, please).

I particularly enjoyed his article “Five reasons not to let social media tools onto your intranet“, which dissects common contrarian attitudes towards social software in the enterprise (mostly by providing pointers to other pragmatic pieces in the same blog). Even when I don’t buy into all of his ideas and concepts I’m subscribed and look forward to more insights like these from the BT organism.

BarCamp Berlin: Social Networks and Enterprise 2.0

At the BarCamp Berlin me and Frank Hamm had an extremely interesting (and well received) double session on Enterprise 2.0. As we asked the participants what bothers them most, the discussion circled a lot around issues of adoption, change management et al.

Yet I managed to discuss some of the slides I prepared, focussing on the significance of social networks for knowledge workers. This is no easy play for Enterprise 2.0 implementation – and I ask myself how far social networking can make inroads into the enterprise. Not only is it seen with suspicious eyes by security-anxious corporate IT teams, it’s also an approach that HR most probably won’t follow: While we know that supporting (informal) networks is key for knowledge workers, and that they want to access a wide diversity of networks, the HR people fear that interesting employees may get snatched away by competitors if made accessible via social networks. While this is a somewhat distorted view of reality (hey, let’s block access to Facebook, but nah, we can’t take away the phone …) it surely puts obstacles in the way of corporate adoption.

More KM blogs …

Luis included me in a list of worthwhile KM blogs, and asks for more.

This is hard as my list resembles Luis’ quite a bit. But here are some more, in no particular order, and playing almost by his rules:

I want to make it very clear though that this is not my complete essential list of KM reads. To me, that would be the entire 200 KM blogs I am subscribed to right now and that I follow on a regular basis. What this list is, actually, is a whole bunch of folks who have grabbed my interest the most just recently and I will be adding a single line per blog detailing what may be of interest to you, so that you would have the opportunity to check them out further, if you wish to.

What does almost mean? I may point out some of the recent entries of the particular blog, that I’ve boomarked recently – using my shared del.icio.us bookmarks which give a neat summmary if and why a peculiar blog is worthwhile:

So here I go:

GridLock – Just another KM Blog, by Arjun Thomas

I bookmarked some 15 entries by Arjun over the course of time, stuff like

What prompts the need to capture Best Practices?
Knowledge Culture (“The bottom line is, do not hoard information. Get as much of it out to your people as possible. They just might surprise you.”)
Capturing and Transferring Knowledge (“unless an organization’s culture is geared towards sharing knowledge, creating systems and processes to enable the sharing of knowledge is a moot point”)
Why KM? (“With attrition levels high, initiatives, ideas and direction are lost. The other driving force for building KM – where is the time to train new joinees?”)

Arjun is clear, knowledgeable and outspoken, like e.g. here (Why E-mails make bad Idea Management Solutions) or here (MS Wiki Vs Wiki):

What Microsoft seem to have done is create a web based front end for microsoft word, and slipped in a interlinking system and called it a wiki. Even with the versioning system this is probably the simplest and least effective wiki i have come across

Then there is Incredibly Dull by Andrew Gent, a quite new blog with only a few posts for the start. But they are fine and thought-provoking, like e.g. Three Types of Knowledge Workers or The Threat of Social Software (for corporate intranets) (part2, part 1).

Third, and last for today is Knowledge Forward by Craig Roth of the Burton Group. This is a pretty new blog but looks promising, at least for people who are into technologies for KM. From Craig’s mission statement aka about:

[…] My goal is to provide information and ideas that help organizations get their knowledge-based Information Technology initiatives moving forward. […]

I have found it fascinating to see how industry consensus emerges around new technologies and concepts and to follow their acceptance from geeks (“Isn’t this a great new technology?”) to VCs (“Wow! Look how much money we can make!”) to end users (“What can this really do for me today?”). I continue researching new areas with a healthy dose of skepticism, applying the lessons I’ve learned so far to each.

So many good blogs, so little time. And now on to Luis’ next challenge, see next post (in BMID).