There are strong risks related to delaying or not implementing efforts to embed the use of collaborative technologies within normal flows of work. Competitors moving more quickly towards adopting Social Business ways of working (through the use of collaborative technologies and the accomplishments they generate) will soon have a distinct competitive advantage. Because the benefits of Social Business require a fundamental change in the way employees work, simply installing software will not be enough to realize its value. Unlike the .com boom of the 1990s, companies falling behind or waiting to begin Social Business efforts will not be able to buy their way back in.

Installing collaborative technologies and using them as a "water cooler" application to promote awareness of corporate events doesn't make your company a social business in 2011. The novelty of wikis in the workplace is over. It's now the degree to which your company can move its "work in progress" to transparent, enterprise, participatory, searchable platforms which ultimately reflects the degree to which your company is "social" in the way it executes its business and serves its customers. 

The thrust of this comment, from Susan's post about Lowe's pay off from investing in a social intranet, reminds me very much of what I wrote in my 2004 chapter for Knowledge Management Tools and Techniques. My chapter was titled, Online Collaboration Tools, Knowledge Managers, and a Cooperative Culture. I said then:

Online collaboration is perhaps the most demanding e-business strategy to attempt, but it is also the strategy that is most likely to provide your organisation with a competitive advantage. This is because the development of the capability to collaborate online takes more than just the right technology, and if you make the investment this is not something that can be easily replicated by your competitors.

It seemed that my keynote talk at KM Singapore helped to change some people’s thinking about intranets. Challenging the notion that they are old, dull sites containing policies, I generated new enthusiasm for what intranets can (and should) do. But the most controversy came during the question-and-answer session, where I found myself saying:

“Blogs and wikis are dead.”

I certainly understand James' sentiment here. I'm also sure some intranet managers will draw a sigh of relief when they read this, thinking they don't need to worry about this social stuff anymore. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, if we look at James' presentation it is full of refined examples of the software patterns that we call wikis and blogs... including REA Group (Jive), IDEO (ThoughtFarmer) and also Reynolds Porter Chamberlain (which integrates Atlassian Confluence along with a number of other platforms). I'm reminded that wiki is both a verb and a noun.

BTW I'm not aware of any leading enterprise 'wiki' that doesn't provide a rich text editor - even Atlassian are ditching wiki markup entirely in their upcoming version of Confluence.

“SharePoint forms the heart of our social networking capabilities within Accenture,” says Crawford, “We use it as a content management system, a publishing platform and for internal communications.”

Corporate Demographics	Social Demographics
230,000 employees	SharePoint 2010 platform with NewsGator add in for Social
Located in 120 countries	Yammer for microblogging
$25  billion in annual revenues	115,000 employees have filled out profiles
Headquarters in Ireland	5000 profile updates a month
CEO: Pierre Nanterme	1000 blog posts a month
List of Executives	12,000 video items posted to Accenture Media Exchange
	4200+ monthly microblog updates

Accenture’s social business initiative also includes a broad based video strategy. Starting with Cisco’s Telepresence at the high-end and desktop video at the low end.

Good timing with this post from Mark Fidelman, since I've been talking about Deloitte's experience with SharePoint, Newsgator and Yammer and enterprise microblogging in general. Its not entirely clear how the complete stack described above is working together at Accenture, however they clearly see value in both tools.

At last week’s E2.0 conference in Boston, I was surprised and pleased by the way my “in-the-flow” phrase has gained common currency.

I was also surprised, but less pleased, by some of the “best practices” I heard flying around. Whether in keynotes, sessions, or just hallway conversations, I heard a lot of claims of dubious merit, claims like:

• Start with a small pilot and let it grow virally
• Invest heavily in community management, because a community is only as successful as its managers
• Workers won’t use social software without personal incentives
• Workers who don’t belong to the Facebook Generation don’t “get” social software.
• Social software adoption requires a culture of collaboration
• You shouldn’t launch collaborative tools without a collaboration strategy

There’s a common theme behind all this advice: You should be scared of launching enterprise social software, because achieving adoption is really hard, really time-consuming, and really expensive.

Sorry friends, but I’m calling Bullshit.

I had to read Michael Idinopulos' post a couple of times to make sure I understood it.

Basically - in a round about way - he is describing two things:

• The complex nature of organisations. 
• That social business tools work, because they help people get work done 'in-the-flow'.

I agree entirely - and this makes the AHA case study a great example.

But lets address this issue of organisational complexity.

Sometimes a simple intervention - like introducing a new technology - can make an immediate impact. But we don't actually know why, although we can observe the benefits when it works. Do the same again in a different situation and you take a gamble on the outcome. For systems of engagement, this is the problem of copying macro level case studies when change actually happens at the micro level of individual groups and individuals. Sometimes it only takes an influential blocker, a critical system that doesn't integrate well, a policy that can't be side stepped or a group that has already picked their own solution - suddenly the dynamic changes.

I use those words deliberately, because the character of some organisations is to be conservative, others are prepared to to be more reckless. Smart organisations take a design-led middle ground. They don't follow knee jerk reactions to new technology, but they don't fall for shallow thinking either.

To help make that point, here are some different case studies (I'm focusing on enterprise microblogging, as there is a level of commonality between them - but this also follows on from some earlier posts):

• Yammer at Suncorp - the viral adoption pattern.
• tibbr at CIBER - tried a couple of solutions, before finding what worked for them.
• Yammer at a small medical practice - hit a technology challenge.
• Chatter at Den-Mat - ran into people and skills issues. 

Each of these examples had a different journey (Micro), but each had a positive story to tell (Macro).

Incidentally, the CIO behind the case study that Idinopulos described has written a detailed post describing the "15 Key Steps for Successful Implementation". This isn't simple, but the steps make it less complex; and its all about finding that fit so that users can get into the flow easily.

QPS was one of the first public-facing organisations to widely and effectively use social media in crisis communication, and that came to fore at the height of the floods in January, described by Premier Anna Bligh as the worst natural disaster in the state's history.

The agency's Facebook page became the defacto one-stop-shop for all of Australia, and for journalists across the different mediums who clambered for minute-by-minute updates.

While some tuned into ABC Radio for news, there was no escaping the QPS Facebook address that was constantly beamed on TV, linked on story pages and repeated on radio.

Great to see Queensland Police Service (QPS) generating interest in the practical and pragmatic use of social media for online engagement with the media, the broader community and during emergencies.

James Klint from QPS was also featured on Gov2Radio yesterday.

Also, worth watching are the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, who also engaging in a useful way through Facebook and on Twitter, where they are represented by their National Communications Manager, Sandi Logan. Like QPS they are engaging pragmatically and using social media as a two-way communication channel, rather than simply broadcasting information.

As an awesome example of a game-based science crowdsourcing project, the Foldit project in itself deserves special mention. They demonstrated that humans still have the edge on pure computing crunching power when it comes to solving complex problems.

However, I'm particularly interested what the project also reveals about the dynamic of involving 'normal' human players in this problem solving. Andrew McAfee provides an excellent summary:

1. We are particularly strong at spatial reasoning, or literally seeing solutions.
2. We have intuition. 
3. We have great adaptivity - McAfee notes that "technologies like wikis are a big step forward in facilitating collaboration within geographically dispersed groups." 
4. While collaborating, we exercise a high degree of self-organization (incidentally, we've since this before in immersive gaming - transitory leadership). 
5. We love competition.

This is all particularly relevant when we think about why and how we should apply Social Business Design thinking to problems faced by organisations.