Day Three: Collaboration

One of the biggest areas of contention is the difference between cooperation and collaboration. Put very simply, collaborative social software supports the engagement of participants in a coordinated effort to solve a problem, with shared commitment and goals, whereas cooperative social software supports informal working where there are no pre-defined goals.

In Enterprise 2.0, I investigate two social computing technologies that can enable cooperation in an enterprise setting.

Wikis

Wikis are most commonly used in organizations for ‘live’ information that constantly changes, such as documentation, although some companies and beginning to use wiki technology across their entire intranets. At European investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, IT employees started using wikis informally to document new software. They then began to migrate them into the broader workplace. After six month the traffic on their internal wiki exceeded that on the company’s intranet.

Wikis are the perfect tool for collaborative or distributed creation of content. Rather than emailing drafts of documents to multiple recipients and collating comments and changes, information can be directly edited in a single place by everyone, with the software tracking revisions. Companies reporting the most success with wikis have given participants a specific focus, such as planning a meeting or conference or creating a policy document.

Wikis do require considerable behavioural change amongst employees if they are to replace previous ways of working. Those with a publishing mentality will find the fact that a document could be in a constant state of draft somewhat uncomfortable. Others are simply not keen on changing what someone else has written without a private discussion first.

Human-based computation

Social software that uses human-based evolutionary computation allows people to contribute solutions to specific problems. These in turn inform the software enabling it to provide better information to the next person (hence ‘evolutionary’). Effectively the traditional roles of computing are reversed: the computer gets the person to do the work rather than the other way round.

Wikis are actually a form of human-based computation (contributing and editing are two examples), but essentially any kind of collaborative problem solving using technology to support the process qualifies. In its most basic form it could just be a system to capture and rank individual contributions by a wider group. The defining factor is that people, not the system, do the work of analysing and recommending. This makes it particularly useful for facilitating consensus and collective decision-making - examples include perpetual brainstorms and idea exchanges as well as internal prediction markets for business forecasting.

Summary

In the 4Cs model, collaborative social software has fewer forms but much wider use (wikis are arguably one of the most common deployments of social software in business, alongside blogs). Perhaps they suit the more formal nature of most organizations. But they also require the biggest behavourial change, which is a huge barrier to adoption.

The final C in the 4Cs model is connection. More on that tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Connection

Today it’s the turn of the second, cooperation (or co-operation, if you prefer).

Day Two: Cooperation

With cooperation I am interested in social software that supports informal working where there are no pre-defined goals, where each contributor retains authority over their contribution, where information is shared as needed and where the software takes on the task of assembling data in order to show the combined picture.

This is in direct contrast to the third C, collaboration (which will be the subject of tomorrow’s post).

In Enterprise 2.0, I consider three social computing technologies that can enable cooperation in an enterprise setting.

Media sharing

Sharing photographs and videos is possibly one of the most popular uses of social software on the public internet, but you might be forgiven for wondering what their application in a business setting could be. Admittedly sharing photos may be a little unlikely in most organizations, but video sharing has great potential for informal learning and knowledge sharing situations (Google has been quoted as wanting to offer YouTube-type technology to its enterprise customers). And it doesn’t have to be limited to images and video - presentations and documents can be just as easily shared.

Fine, you might say, but we can already share documents on our intranet. That may well be true, but social media sharing requires more:

• Everyone should be able to create, publish and share, not just a select group of authors or editors;
• They should be able to tag what they share with any keyword;
• They should be able to extend the value of others’ contributions through tagging, voting and/or commenting;
• The system should extrapolate this information to identify patterns, relationships and common groupings of content and people;
• It should also provide multiple ways for employees to filter the information for themselves and for others;

Social bookmarking

In business, relatively little use has been made of social bookmarking tools even though they have applications in almost every corporate department, from research to product development and customer service to PR. In addition, being able to visualise the connections between employees and topics should benefit those with geographically dispersed and fragmented workforces.

Many knowledge management professionals baulk at the thought of employees using tags to generate the metadata on which their classification systems get based. But one of the major benefits this brings is the ability to locate expertise with the organization, by finding experts (or potential experts) based on the tags they use.

Social cataloguing

As with media sharing, just about any type of information can be subjected to the collective wisdom of the organization. Consumer-focused social cataloguing applications cover things such as academic citations, books, music, products and wireless networks. In the enterprise, it has endless possibilities.

Any type of corporate data - competitor intelligence, supplier recommendations or contact information - could be handed over to employees for collective management rather than relying on a single owner or administrator and outdated data collection techniques.

The biggest barrier to social cataloguing is managers reluctant to risk reducing their headcounts (and power bases) by replacing them with software that allows everyone to do the task and thus intermediate their reports.

Summary

Cooperative social software is very good at enabling interaction in organizations with informal cultures, but for more formal organization structures, collaborative social software may be more appropriate.

Tomorrow: Collaboration

I respectfully disagree.

The problem with email at the moment is not email, but people. Basically, we need to re-learn how to manage our inboxes alongside all the other information flows. And it’s possible.

For Christmas 2006 I requested a copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done for my stocking. On my return to work I used the GTD process to empty my inbox (aside: straight after a holiday is an ideal time to do this).

Since then, my inbox gets processed regularly and is always empty when I switch off for the day and most of the time in between. As a result I’ve felt more in control and responsive to my colleagues. And more importantly, I’ve seen incoming email reduce drastically as a result of social tools like RSS. I must confess that I actually relish the arrival of new mail so that I can process it and get back to my work as quickly as possible.

So fine, go ahead and kill your email if it bogs you down. But I suggest that a day reading Allen’s book and applying the GTD to your email workflow will make you much more productive in the longer term.

Starting today I’m going to introduce the model for how to apply enterprise 2.0 concepts that forms the nucleus of the book. On Friday, I’ll sum up and leave you with some further thoughts.

Introducing the 4Cs

Andrew McAfee’s SLATES and Dion Hinchcliffe’s FLATNESSES models are both very good, but tend to focus on the components or characteristics of enterprise 2.0. For the purposes of categorizing the social software tools that I cover, I have used a more simple four-category classification model, focused on the action involved. It is imaginatively called “The 4Cs Approach” and comprises:

• Communication - platforms that allow employees to converse with each other, either by text, image, voice or video, or a combination thereof;
• Cooperation - software that enables employees to share content with others in both structured and unstructured ways;
• Collaboration - tools that encourage employees to collaborate with each other on particular problems, directly and indirectly, in both central and distributed ways;
• Connection - technologies that make it possible for employees to make connections with and between both content and each other.

The relationships between these categories and the levels of formality and interactions that exist in a company can be visualised thus, and should be considered within the context of the corporate culture when introducing different forms of social software into an organization:

Day One: Communication

Communication is a fundamental social process - a basic human needs as well as a basic organizational one. In organizations there are different types of communication flow: formal; downward; upward; horizontal and networked. But the one where social software can contribute most is informal.

In Enterprise 2.0, I focus on five social computing technologies that enable communication.

Discussion forums

Internal discussion forums will be familiar to most organizations as their first foray into the world of social software, although they probably didn’t recognize it as such at the time. They appeal to the command and control mindset of many IT departments as they can impose categories, rules and moderation. Discussion forums usually fail when this control restricts the type and immediacy of conversation that takes place.

Blogs

Blogs are probably the most widely known form of social software. In the enterprise, they are used knowledge management, business intelligence and project management and can, over time, provide a rich seam of intellectual capital that can be tapped into long after the original authors have moved on. Blogs generally require less formality than forums. They are less structured and do not rely on others to keep the conversation flowing.

Instant messaging

Whilst the purists might argue that instant messaging isn’t social software, it is increasingly used as a serious business tool. One of its main business benefits is the ability for each employee to have multiple ‘conversations’ taking place at any one time. In a call centre, for instance, an operator may have one chat session open with a specific colleague in a different department helping them answer a customer query, a ‘team’ session that all members of the department participate in, and a search window that provides access to previous conversations on similar topics.

Social presence

Social presence builds on the concept of instant messaging by providing a central update mechanism that broadcasts messages from individuals to their subscribers. There are three types of social presence: informational (e.g. Facebook status updates); temporal (e.g. Twitter); and geolocational (e.g. Loopt). As well as providing a way for employees to communicate with each other, social presence can be a powerful way for the organization to keep in touch with its staff.

Virtual worlds

Virtual worlds allow peope to meet and interact with others in a computer-based spaces designed to resemble the real world (usually!). Inside companies, these ‘intraverses’ provide environments for activities such as holding meetings, conducting training or simply socializing with colleagues.

Summary

For any company investigating the world of social software, communication tools are the simplest, most inexpensive and often most effective methods of experimentation. They work best where the organizational culture is more informal and where individual effort is rewarded over group problem-solving.

Tomorrow: Cooperation

I was pleasantly surprised to find a chapter on “the groundswell in your company” so having dutifully absorbed the introduction and first two chapters, I skipped straight to page 215.

Charlene and Josh look at three types of what they call “internal groundswell applications” - an internal community at Best Buy, wikis at Avenue A/Razorfish, Organic and Intel, and an idea exchange at Bell Canada. All five case studies are worth exploring further, even if the business impact isn’t as clearly defined as you might like.

The Forrester Research analysts also offer three strategies for nurturing the internal groundswell:

• promote a listening culture from the top down;
• ease and encourage participation with incentives (the equivalent of what I mean by leading on individual value);
• find and empower the rebels in your organisation.

I’ll let you know how I get on with the rest of the book.

In the words of foreword contributor, Don Tapscott, “read, enjoy and prosper”.

The official publication date has been confirmed as 21 July, but I’ve already heard from someone who pre-ordered that theirs arrived yesterday.

I’m now in the process of making sure the key people involved get either a hard copy or the eBook version to thank them for their contributions.

If you want to purchase your own copy, you can do so at the publisher’s site or Amazon (UK or US). If you interested in a bulk order in order to give copies to your staff, senior executives, conference delegates or otherwise, drop me a line to see if I can get you a discount.

Now the real work begins…

Whilst I’m away, I thought I’d leave you with this cartoon from Geek And Poke explaining what it really means to embrace Enterprise 2.0:

• Hyperconnected: “Those who have fully embraced the brave new world, with more devices per capita than the other clusters and more intense use of new communications applications. They liberally use technology devices and applications for both personal and business use.”
• Increasingly Connected: “Those who are using multiple devices and applications but fewer than the hyperconnected. They use blogs and wikis, but they are half as likely as the hyperconnected to be involved with social networks, a third as likely to use voice over IP (VoIP).”
• Passive Online: “Those who use even fewer devices but are beginning to experiment with some applications, like instant messaging, but aren’t ready for more advanced Web 2.0 applications, like social networking or video conferencing over the Web.”
• Barebones Users: “Those who are online but pretty much stick to email, desktop access to the Internet, and cell phone use for voice calls.”

The analysis clearly shows a bias towards the number of devices as the key indicator of connectedness. Whilst this is not surprising given who commissioned the research, I’m not sure it’s the best or only indicator, as it doesn’t take an IDC researcher to tell you that the more devices someone has, the more applications they are likely to use. This bias is shown most clearly in the geographic breakdown of results. Of all the regions, North America had fewer ‘hyperconnected’ or ‘increasingly connected’ respondents. I can understand completely why that would be true for devices as the region was quite late to the mobile internet party, but are they really telling us that use of connected applications is higher in every other region? I personally find that hard to believe.

But what of the impact on the enterprise. Well, they identify six key challenges of which only three are worth repeating (the other three are predictably designed to support Nortel’s market position):

1. The lines between business use and personal use for devices and applications are blurring, making usage harder to monitor or police.
2. These new technologies and applications will affect the work/life balance, which employers may need to support.
3. The hyperconnected will expect to work in a rich communication environment, so employers will need to provide solutions in order to attract and retain the most connected people.

You can grab the report from Nortel’s website (name and email registration required).

We believe this the principle of a collaborative data source is a very powerful extension to the corporate wiki and will enable very effective collaboration among organization and individuals. It harnesses not only the collective knowledge within an organization, but also enables the organization to leverage knowledge outside the organization itself. 

I think this is an area which has largely been ignored by most social software commentators, yet it is very easy to demonstrate clear, practical examples to business. I left the following comment:

Yes, they [collaborative structured databases] are [an opportunity for business]. I have used them in the past for capturing and organizing ideas, but there is clearly a bigger opportunity. In my book, I call them Social Cataloguing tools and consider them to be more cooperative than collaborative due to the fact that they support informal working where there are no pre-defined goals. 

In the enterprise, social cataloguing has endless possibilities. Any type of corporate data - competitor intelligence, suppliers, contact data, etc. - could be handed over to employees for collective management rather than central administration.

I think the biggest barrier is that in large organizations there are people employed specifically to do this job. Managers are therefore reluctant to risk reductions to their headcounts (and power bases) by replacing them with software that allows everyone to do the task and thus intermediate those people.