Following on from Mark Jones's podcast about enterprise social media, this week's The Scoop vodcast looks at the related but broader topic of collaboration.

Mark examines the concept of collaboration from the perspective of both a technologist (a CIO) and a non-technologist (a research psychologist) - its quite interesting to see how they both approach this idea.

The technologist in this case is Ken Gallacher, CIO at the ABC. In the last half of the interview, he also has some interesting things to say about the use microblogging at the ABC and the importance of both talking and listening.

What if your existing enterprise systems, such as your ERP or CRM platform of choice, were to exist within a microblogging environment? The enterprise system becomes a collaborative entity empowered to add information and data to the stream when and where appropriate.

Three vendors have recently sparked my interest for what they are doing that goes beyond simple microblogging and collaboration.

Jevon talks about three vendors that have caught his attention:

• Akibot
• Brainpark
• Tibbr

They remind me a little of past experiments with IBM Lotus Sametime 'bots' that could be used as a simple interface for querying data or pushing information to the right person at the right time through instant messaging. However, these new tools that Jevon has identified are designed to be more than simply passive or reactive interfaces - instead they are part of the stream of activity, interpreting or responding to activity in an intelligent way.

Of course, even integration of data to and from the stream can be useful. In the comments, Socialcast point out that Socialcast Ease offers integration with other enterprise and Web 2.0 systems through its API. I'm also reminded of Attensa's Streamserver, although while this isn't traditionally treated as a microblogging tool it offers some similar activity stream capabilities and also offers an API.

Also, having spent three days last week in a training workshop looking at IBM Lotus Connections and getting under the hood of its API, I'm conscious that there is a range of other social platforms ready and able to help integrate social and application information and activity.

But before we get too excited, Jevon makes a good point at the end of his post that its important we don't use these new capabilities to simply create additional 'noise' for customers and people inside organisations (i.e. a positive filter failure). I'd also add that in doing this we should seek to get the balance right between human and computed intelligent middleware for the best result.

Through some serendipity, I came across Zaana Howard's CPA Australia case study on enterprise microblogging. In these three parts, we again see a very familiar viral and low friction adoption pattern.

From this experience, Zaana highlights the benefits (knowledge sharing, better communication and expertise location) but also a number lessons learnt, that hinge particularly on the point that "viral success is not enough".

This reminded me that a couple of years ago I came across an organisation that was awash with enterprise social computing tools - wikis, blogs, video, rss, dashboard etc - but each tool was lost within a sea of legacy and traditional intranet and information management tools. The average user in that organisation could barely find anything on the intranet that was already there, let alone the new wave of tools.

It was a shame because the earlier adopters had embraced them and could see the future benefits, but they were actually talking about removing all the social computing tools from their systems because mixing the old and new world was completely unplanned.

BTW Have a look through my blog archives to find more case studies and examples of enterprise microblogging at work.

Over night I've had a chance to sit back and review the buzz about Google's Buzz (to avoid confusion with Yahoo! Buzz or any other social apps with 'buzz' in its name).

One thing I will say first off is that we know Google has an excellent track record overall with producing fast, usable, popular Web apps and services. There is no doubt in my mind that Gmail is in fact the best email client available* (yes, even better than any desktop client I've ever used). For example, why can't all email clients deal with meeting invites like Gmail? So, on the face of it, Gmail and Buzz looks like a great combination from a user experience perspective. The mobile client, experienced through my location aware iPhone, also feels good.

However, alas, these days I spend most of my time in a desktop mail client or my iPhone mail client, because I've got multiple mail boxes to manage (and no, I don't want to route them via Gmail). Unfortunately a lot of the really good stuff appears to take place in the client provided by Google... so are all those third-party developers going to be able to replicate that experience in the mailbox you are using instead?

This is quite a contrast to Twitter, with its generally minimalist approach that has seeded a great deal of innovation both in terms of software, but also how people have invented different ways of working around and within its constraints. Twitter works better for me as it sits separately from other identities - and in fact, using a desktop Twitter client I can manage multiple identities. I also have a slick iPhone app to go with it.

Google of course is placing emphasis on the power of analytics of overcome filter failure. However, as I signed up for Buzz via Gmail I felt it failed on the first hurdle. There was no one it suggested that I either wasn't already following some other way or didn't particularly want to follow anyway. Of course, that's just my experience. An opt in suggestion or expertise location is one thing, but scanning my Gmail address book and equating that to my socialgraph is, well, a major filter failure if you ask me.

I note that Dion Hinchcliffe wrote yesterday about the same issue and said:

"for hyperpersonal, in Buzz this is driven by underlying algorithms that filter and guide the user experience. Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, noted that Google’s insight into the early Web with the famousPage Rank algorithm drove their initial success. He went on to hint that they believe the same algorithmic insight into the Social Web will succeed with Buzz. Either way, Google has clearly used its competency in data and computation to attempt to one-up today’s online social networking services... I do think they’re generally on the right track here but the left brain approach to the Web that dominates Google’s product strategy tends to obscure the notion that social systems are also highly self-organizing and emergent.

To me, Google Buzz makes a lot of sense for people that do spend a time in Gmail and have lots of friends using Gmail and Google Chat. It will make a lot of sense if they are aiming, as they've hinted, at providing a corporate version as part of their enterprise apps offering (so, rather than Twitter being concerned, its the likes of Yammer and Social Cast that should keep an eye on Google in this instance).

If its going to fail, its because ironically it might be because its too clever for its own good.

*Ok, I admit it - its just the Ninja theme I love.

My blog friend, Samuel Driessen, was quoted in this Economist piece looking at the value of enterprise social networking, particularly enterprise microblogging. He talks about the practical benefits of enterprise microblogging to his company:

"the messaging system has helped the firm spot where work is in danger of being duplicated and share information about sales prospects."

The rest of the article is well worth reading, before you forward it to your boss :-)

This reminds me of another great case study I came across recently, this time from Social Text (who are also quoted in the Economist) - it describes the value a manufacturing company gets from using Social Text's integrated enterprise wiki and microblogging system:

"Signals allows all that communication to be searchable and discoverable later," [the company's Knowledge and Information Manager] says. "The more stuff we've normally done in e-mail that we can pull into a Signals is a victory as far I'm concerned."

As these examples demonstrate, enterprise microblogging is more than mindless chatter.

Q. What are your thoughts on collaborative versus top-down management?

A. Collaboration is one of the most difficult challenges in management. I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.

Q. Why did that shift occur?

A. I would say two things. One is just the massive information revolution. But equally important is the fact that before, while there were global companies, they were really just a collection of very local businesses operating independently from each other. Now a global company means a company composed of teams that are themselves dispersed. So every team can be global in many senses, not just the company.

But with the explosion of information, and flattening technologies starting with e-mail, I think that a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration, because employees already have all the data. They have access to everything.

You have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.

Q. How do you create that culture?

A. One thing we use is a Twitter-like system on our intranet called Yammer.

Timely interview considering my comments about virtual teams just now, although there is more to this that just enterprise microblogging!

Hat tip to Andrew McAfee, who also highlights some key points if you want the abridged version of this interview.

"Even though we have a small staff--around 33 employees--there were many silos built up across the department," he says. Microblogging, he hoped, would help get his staff talking and collaborating.

After evaluating several microblogging tools, Eby and his team decided on Socialtext's Signals, a microblogging tool that is accessed via a browser, mobile device or an Adobe AIR desktop application and is integrated with a wiki, social networking profiles and "activity streams" (which are similar to the Facebook News Feed).

This CIO article highlights 3 enterprise microblogging case studies - two of the case studies are about large technology companies (still interesting, but not necessarily reflective of everyone's experience). However, the other example describes the experiences of St. Louis Public Radio in the US, which only employees around 33 staff.

For me this reflects my own personal rule of thumb that its not just the size of an organisation that makes enterprise social computing useful, but the structure of the organisation and how these different roles relate to each other.

Giving it a go.