Der überwältigende Erfolg öffentlicher Wikis hat dazu geführt, dass inzwischen auch zahlreiche Organisationen diese Informations- und Kommunikationssysteme einsetzen. Bislang wissen wir aber nur wenig darüber, unter welchen Bedingungen organisationale Wikis sich etablieren können und welche Konsequenzen dies für Organisationen hat.
In einem von der Volkswagenstiftung geförderten interdisziplinären Forschungsprojekt erkunden Wissenschaftler an der Forschungstelle für Neue Kommunikationsmedien und am Lehrstuhl für Angewandte Informatik in den Kultur-, Geschichts- und Geowissenschaften seit Mai 2007 genau diese Bedingungen und Konsequenzen, die Wikis in Organisationen zu einer erfolgreichen Innovation machen.
Die Ergebnisse dieser Forschung stellen wir am 27. Februar 2009 an der Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg im Rahmen eines Expertensymposiums aus Praktikern und Wissenschaftlern vor.
Und ich bin dabei – hier das pdf der Ankündigung. Gespannt bin ich vor allem auf die Forschungsergebnisse aus systemtheoretischem Hintergrund und die abgeleiteten Praxisempfehlungen. Erste Eindrücke werde ich (gegebenfalls, hängt wie immer von der WLan-/UMTS-Netzabdeckung ab) twittern. Aber nun erst einmal auf den Weg nach Bamberg.
Jay Cross is asking you to participate in a study on informal learning (and the effects of web 2.0 on the corporate world). Take part, you can get the results after the questionnaire closes on June 5th.
This is the networked professional’s web 2.0, via Sebastien Sauteur I found Vincenzo Cammaratas master thesis, called “Wikibility of Innovation Oriented Workplaces – The CERN Case” (pdf). Here’s the abstract, I have skimmed through the +100 pages over the weekend and recommend it basically:
[…] Wiki systems and other social networking applications
represent an important shift on the way in which people work: at the opposite of other previous IT technologies in this field, the Enterprise 2.0 is not about simple devices of office automation, but requires (and brings to) a dramatic organizational culture shift. In particular Wiki offers new possibilities and opportunities in order to exploit in a more effective way the entire potential of the collaborative work coming from the active participation of all the individuals that are present in a workplace.
This dissertation wants to contribute to the current debate on the cultural shift that the introduction of this tool in a workplace is able to produce: we will see that, for a Wiki – or any Enterprise 2.0 tool – being effective it has to activate a virtuous circle able to create new knowledge.
The peculiarity of this work is that it focuses on this particular cultural
aspect and aims to define the features of the ideal workplace that can optimize wiki use in order to be innovation oriented and “hence” competitive.
Once identified these “cultural key drivers” and defined Wikibility as the
cultural attitude of an environment able to make the Wiki use in a workplace effective, the further scope of this thesis is to measure the presence of this Wikibility mind-set and to propose a new tool (not yet validated). This sort of cockpit could be useful for the management that, interested to promote a better and true collaborative approach to work, wants to be sure on the effective support in order to produce true innovation.
I like the goal of his work and am absolutely sympathetic (hmm, wikibility, yes, a neologism but I dig it) – but I am also a bit cautious. “Measuring” organizational culture and designing a cockpit or “dashboard” that enables management to steer (and control) processes of organizational change sure is attractive, as is the vision of an “ideal wiki situation” where implementation of enterprise 2.0 is naturally, but I doubt that the CERN situation nor the learnings made there can be replicated in “normal organizations”. And I sure don’t buy the idea that a fitting organizational culture must be present in advance, as “a preliminary workplace attitude”, put forth here (see slide 15):
You can be very successful in use tools associated with E2.0 (blogs, wikis, tag and social bookmarks, etc) even in situations where culture is “unhealthy” – and when participation is more or less “directed” by role, workflow, and functional duties
Michael entering stage too:
[…] There is a view out there that an organization needs to have a “culture of collaboration” culture in order to successfully employ wikis and other Enterprise 2.0 tools.
That view is dead wrong. I’ve seen wikis thrive in un-collaborative cultures. I’ve seen wikis fail in collaborative cultures. I’ve seen wikis thrive in an organization alongside failing wikis in the same organization.
Even within “non-collaborative” cultures, people have to work with other people. We’ve seen lots of examples of wikis being introduced into those cultures in very safe ways – to streamline and simplify existing business interactions within existing organizational silos.
He also elaborates on an example of how social software inside an organization can act as a change catalyst – yes, the way I see it is that social software is both a driver and an enabler (or infrastructure) of organizational change.
Gestern ging Wikisym 2007, das Internationale Symposium on Wikis in Montreal, CA zu Ende. Oberthema der Konferenz war “Wikis at Work in the World: Open, Organic, Participatory Media for the 21st Century”.
Die Papers der Konferenz stehen größtenteils zum Download zur Verfügung, ebenso sind die Ergänzungen und Diskussionen im Konferenzwiki offen. Im Wiki sollen dann auch Blogbeiträge zur Wikisym 2007 erfasst werden, bspw. erste Einträge und Einschätzungen bei Axel Bruns und Andreas Gohr.
Notiz an mich: Wikis aus soziologischer und kommunikationstheoretischer Perspektive in der neuesten Ausgabe von kommunikation&gesellschaft, die einzelnen Papers können als pdf heruntergeladen werden.
Interessant scheinen das Editorial (Wikis – Diskurse, Theorien und Anwendungen, pdf) von Christian Stegbauer, Klaus Schönberger und Jan Schmidt, sowie der Beitrag von Jan Sebastian Schmalz (Zwischen Kooperation und Kollaboration, zwischen Hierarchie und Heterarchie. Organisationsprinzipien und -strukturen von Wikis, abstract, pdf).
Partly note to myself, partly note to those readers who don’t abhor a good research paper now and then: This looks interesting, in HBS First Look (of May 29):
Leading and Creating Collaboration in Decentralized Organizations” by Heather M. Caruso and Todd Rogers with Professor Max Bazerman
From the introduction:
Many employees note that, in decentralized organizations, it is harder to deal with other divisions or departments of their organization than it is to negotiate with outside suppliers or customers. In ordinary cases, this intraorganizational coordination failure which can cost substantial sums of money. […]
Often, instances of coordination failure stem from the failure to appropriately structure the organization around the key interdependencies within the organization – whether that suggests organizing by function (e.g., sales, marketing, manufacturing, engineering, etc.), by product group, or by region. Yet, even when organizations are able to design divisions around the appropriate dimensions, there will always be a need to integrate information across the resulting units. We focus this paper on improving information coordination across these organizational units to maximize organizational effectiveness.
While social software is not explicitly mentioned, I think that it has potential for the described kinds of organizational problems and tasks: Effectively supporting an organizational design thinking that envisions emergent, boundary-crossing and adaptive collaboration.
