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.
More on the social side of knowledge management via elearnspace: “The state of social networking software for the enterprise”:
Two things come to mind with enterprise use of social tools:
1) Organizations that I’ve worked with are generally too unaware of themselves and their strengths and expertise. Social software can greatly aid the “coming to know oneself” that most larger corporations need…but too often, hierarchy and information secrecy reduce it’s effectiveness.2) Expertise and knowledge are not “database-able”. They reside in people. And tools are required that initiate and sustain dialogue that translates into deeper levels of understanding. Software, like social networking tools, is an enabler, but often clashes against the existing culture of the organization. Software implementation is a change process…
Yes, social software can help raising (knowledge and competency) awareness, where it acts as an enabler, facilitating communication, and possibly also cooperation and collaboration.
Sören Stamer, CEO von Coremedia (hier das Video seines Next07-Vortrags), im Interview mit dem Fischmarkt-Team, u.a. zu zeitgemäßer Unternehmensorganisation aber auch den Implementierungserfahrungen bei Coremedia, u.a.:
Was bedeutet die Post-Web-2.0-Ära für klassische Unternehmen?
Der Hauptpunkt ist der, dass der Kampf gegen den Paradigmenwechsel nicht zu gewinnen sein wird. Jedes Unternehmen kann zwar versuchen, dagegen zu arbeiten, aber meiner Meinung nach wird man mit dieser Strategie nicht erfolgreich sein können. Traditionelle Modelle mit starren Hierarchien und starker Machtorientierung werden leiden und möglicherweise untergehen, weil die Welt um sie herum sich grundlegend ändert.
[…]
Mit dem Medium Internet hat sich eine kulturelle Revolution in Gang gesetzt: Selbstorganisation statt starre Hierarchien. Kompetenzen statt Kontrolle. Kooperation statt Kampf. Werte statt Macht. Technologie hat somit in erster Linie einen kulturellen Effekt.
I like this approach in explaining the motives and rationale behind enterprise 2.0. This is accessible and comprehensible to the ordinary business user, quite entertaining as well …
Some days ago I noted (much too short) Accenture’s efforts to introduce web 2.0 concepts into their corporate intranet, following a report from IT Business.
Now I’ve read Mike Gottas take on the news, where he basically welcomes the new addition to the “social software business case collection”, while pointing out that:
professional services has always been a pathfinder industry segment when it comes to early adoption of certain technology.
because
Connecting with other people in organizations that essentially “sell know how” is a perfect environment for introducing tools that help with information sharing, communication, collaboration and community-building (e.g., KM).
Yet he warns to see this case as a false positive, something I partially agree with, if only because it’s straight and normal business of IT consultancies to explore “the edges” and to prepare answers before clients ask.
But while exploring the edges of changing technologies is for sure no business any CIO engages in, they might ask Accenture (or other consultants, hint) for advice regarding this “enterprise 2.0”-thing they’ve heard about. So, I wonder whether this will turn out to be just another “case study” or the start of something bigger (like all the other consultancies marketing their very own efforts and experiences …).
Andrew McAfee on the adoption challenges of enterprise 2.0, when web2.0-style tools are seen as superfluous, must-not-have and an “unproductive thing to do”:
people who use the new tools heavily – who post frequently to an internal blog, edit the corporate wiki a lot, or trade heavily in the internal prediction market — will be perceived as not spending enough time on their ‘real’ jobs
[…]
In environments that value ‘busyness’ enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts can be seen as laggards, goof-offs, and people who don’t have either enough to do or enough initiative to find more real work to do.
This is not surprising, as we all know that this organizational pathology of “you’ve got to be busy” is both widespread and (ironically) utterly unproductive …
Yet, he makes perfectly clear that especially knowledge based organizations can profit from enterprise 2.0 oriented collaboration support, so when introduction is not easy, management guidance and leadership is are even more essential.
Companies that are full of knowledge workers and that have built cultures that value busyness face a potentially sharp dilemma when it comes to E2.0. These companies stand to benefit a great deal if they can build emergent platforms for collaboration, information sharing, and knowledge creation. But they may be in a particularly bad position to build such platforms not because potential contributors are too busy, but because they don’t want to be seen as not busy enough.
And even if the leaders in such companies sincerely want to exploit the new tools and harness the collective intelligence of their people, they might have a tough time convincing the workforce that busyness is no longer the ne plus ultra. Corporate cultures move slowly and with difficulty, and it will take a lot more than a few memos, speeches, and company retreats to convince people that it’s a smart career idea, rather than a poor one, to contribute regularly and earnestly to E2.0 platforms.
Besides, this illustrates that enterprise 2.0 tools and methods must be intertwined and knitted into daily work processes and routines to ease adoption – when they are added-on superficially, one runs into exactly the problems Andrew notes.
Update: Marcel de Ruiter adds his thoughts to the “no time” excuse that threatens to keep participation low, arguing that the benefits of social software for an individual knowledge-worker should be pointed out more. I second that and observed that similar issues have been part of failed past knowledge management efforts, mainly those that focussed on corporate (and down to group) uses, both in the design of knowledge management solutions and in the design of implementation and change projects (“we the company know what is needed”).
So, please, don’t let us make the same mistakes again, start bottom-up (and add top-down support as much as possible). This CEO and CIO support is essential, because strategic issues are touched and need to be sorted out. One example is that it’s mandatory for the acceptance of internal social networking, to facilitate the transfer and exchange of corporate social networks between different employers (you know, this is no longer a world of “IBM now, IBM forever”). While this is all about individual benefit trumping official corporate policy, it’s also deeply logical as value creation processes cross inter-organizational frontiers anyway all the time.
Via IT Business, an insight into Accenture’s efforts to introduce web 2.0 concepts into their corporate intranet:
[…] borrowing ideas from online services such as Facebook, De.licio.us, YouTube, Wikipedia and Second Life to remake Accenture’s employee intranet.
Just this month, Accenture went live with a new global employee network that looks much like Facebook, the popular web site on which mostly young people share pictures and information about their interests.
Accenture also has visual, context-assisted search capabilities already up and running. […] picked up on the idea of allowing every user to tag content as the De.licio.us web site does, thus creating a co-operative way of classifying material that benefits all users.
[…] And there will be wikis – co-operatively edited Web pages – to allow anyone in the company to publish material for internal use. “If you make it easy for your employees to publish information, they’ll publish information,”
[…] “The younger employees carry it,” he says – they will be the first to publish on wikis, to tag content and so on. Others will follow as they see the value, though Rippert adds that some of the new capabilities, such as improved search functions, will replace the old way of doing things and employees will have little choice about using them.
I wonder what other elements will be introduced next. Social bookmarking would seem to be a logical next step, or perhaps internal blogs?