chieftech’s blog

User participation is now an established feature of the economy, spreading from product development and software to a much broader base of activities, such as marketing and manufacturing, and sectors, including social media, automotives and cosmetics, among others. Early analyses of user participation pointed to the importance of building large communities, creating effective incentives for participation and implementing more flexible forms of organization. Looking back a few years later, the good news is that active participation continues to spread. The bad news is that harnessing participation is more difficult than we thought. Stimulating a continuous flow of high-quality contributions should be the focus of companies that want to take advantage of user participation.

Well, actually, if you've been hanging around knowledge management and collaboration for a while you wouldn't expect it to be easy :-)

I still think Clay Shirky sums this up best - you need:

"a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users"

Working in virtual teams is a growing phenomenon and most business executives are positive about the benefits of working this way. Respondents to our survey agree that virtual working allows them to collaborate with colleagues across the organisation, it gives them access to a global talent pool and it improves their organisation’s competitiveness.

As more tools have become available (often at low, or no, cost), virtual working has evolved as the natural way for organisations to carry out tasks and business processes. However, little planning has gone into how these tools should be used and how they will be used by different cultures or even across the gender divide.

But as these technologies become more prevalent, more thought will be needed on how best to adapt an organisation to work more effectively using these technologies. Historically, meeting in person at the launch of a project or when a conflict arises has been an important means of resolving issues. But face-to-face meetings are not always practical or cost-effective. It is therefore imperative that teams agree on clear rules for communication from the start. Managers then need to “hyper-communicate” with the team, constantly verifying what has been understood and carefully monitoring the entire communications process. Doing so will dispel many misunderstandings—many, but not all.

There has been so more thought, researched and written about virtual teams (and related topics, like collaboration, knowledge management, etc) of the years but according to this research report from The Economist Intelligence Unit, virtual teams have emerged with very little thought or support.

That emergence may or may not be a good thing in itself, but the net effect is that virtual teams probably aren't as effective as they could be. Looking at the tools being used - primarily email, voice and Webconferencing - the newer social tools rank poorly. Based on my own experiences of being part of different virtual teams over the years and more recently working with Headshift, I can tell you that there is huge potential to improve how virtual teams function using enterprise social computing.

But when we look at this from the perspective of the debate about the value of Enterprise 2.0, I think there is an even more important lesson here: these technologies will be used, but you have a choice - plan to use them well, or keep your fingers crossed that people will work it out for themselves.

BTW Being part of a virtual team doesn't mean you never meet people face-to-face. If you are in Sydney this Thursday morning, come and join us for an early coffee to discuss Enterprise 2.0, virtual teams and more.

Hmm. I'm trying to work the significance of this research (if any). However, more data is good, right?

I can't but help think that their perspective is all wrong, rather than anything else. I get the impression that social networking and social media is thought as something out there beyond the walls of the organisation, rather than something that is in fact everywhere. Does this explain why they are surprised that these tools are being used for collaboration within and between organisation, not just between companies and their customers?

Their main conclusion is the "need for stronger governance and IT involvement", but again I wonder if in fact what they mean is that these new technologies have a broader impact beyond marketing and therefore need involvement from across the organisation to determine how to best integrate them into business as usual.

I come back again to the Headshift/Dachis Group's Social Business Design model - focusing on governance and IT involvement is just a symptom, when what is needed is new perspectives to management.

Hat tip to Oliver.

Well, who would have guessed this would have come out of Novell?

I think Pulse actually makes Wave a lot more interesting, if they can interoperate as well as Novell claims.

Hopefully we'll see more Pulses and Waves coming down the line too.

The authors of this short piece on collaboration propose 12 categories of knowledge worker that they have matched to different collaboration technologies that have defined as being well suited, adequate or ill suited.

I'm a little worried about some of the suggested technologies (they recommend fax machines for some, but why not scan-to-email?) and I think you need to be careful to rule out a tool that is marked as ill suited for collaboration as it might still have application to that knowledge worker *outside* the domain of collaboration itself. However, even thinking about the 12 categories does help to raise awareness that different knowledge workers have different collaboration needs, and that's a good thing!

They also 10 forms of waste in collaboration, which might be a great starting point for putting together a business case to support collaboration with technology.

Just in case you thought augmented reality (AR) was all about marketing gimmicks involving mobile phones and barcodes, this example from some Finnish researchers shows how some people are thinking about other ways of applying augmented and virtual reality to business. Actually many of these ideas aren't new but perhaps what is more interesting is that the technological barriers are falling and in easy (or very close) reach of consumers. I suspect that the only real barrier is probably the headsets! However, these experiments all pave the way for new, innovative methods for collaborating and manipulating data to come.

Hat tip to Games Alfresco.

I think its going to be a couple of years before Google really builds up its 'wave front' - but thisl an open standards based protocol - stop thinking of Wave just as its seen in the flashy demo video or the sandbox developer account you managed to scrounge that you can't do much with.

Bottom line - stop thinking 'new fangled email crossed with IM and social networking' and think powerful content centric collaboration and document editing.

Some good analysis by Jed. It also explains why I'm watching, but not too worried about playing with Google Wave just yet...

Well known for his thoughtful analysis (and pretty diagrams) about the two dot oh domain, Dion Hinchcliffe has proposed 14 reasons why Enterprise 2.0 projects fail:

1. It starts strong in a single department and then never makes it out;
2. Selecting the tools first;
3. Selecting the wrong tools and sticking with them;
4. There are no resources allocated to adoption and training;
5. It’s purely an IT initiative;
6. The effort excludes IT;
7. Engaging with HR, legal, branding, compliance, etc. too soon;
8. Pushing Enterprise 2.0 as a generic toolbox instead of the solution to specific problems;
9. Lack of effective executive champions;
10. Lack of effective participants: Empty blogs, wikis, or silent social networks;
11. No long term plan or budget for governance, community management, upgrades, or maintenance;
12. Failure to draw in key influencers as adoption broadens;
13. Building it all as a self-contained, top-down effort; and
14. Not waiting long enough to let critical mass build.

I’ve read through this list a few times now, trying to tease out some new or special factor that is specific to Enterprise 2.0 projects, but I just can’t see it. While these issues might be considered uncommon in certain types of IT projects, they are very common in projects that affect the areas of individual work practices that people have discretion over. We have seen these problems for years - but now the label has changed from “knowledge management” or “collaboration” to “Enterprise 2.0”.

Unfortunately many companies have a bad track record in how they have introduced groupware and collaboration tools in the past - social computing technology alone is unlikely to change that (and hence the Enterprise 2.0 technology and culture debate, although its more than just culture too).

I looked at Social Software back in 2005 for a NSW KM Forum presentation and commented then on the difference between old groupware and collaboration solutions with social software (see slide 6). I think it is important to consider what has changed:

• The technologies of Enterprise 2.0 exhibit different characteristics from those we had in the past; and
• In addition, there is growing population of workers who are familiar with these technologies based on their experiences of using the Web.

If we understand this, then we have a chance to avoid past mistakes. In my view there are four key rules of thumb for avoiding Enterprise 2.0 project failure:

• Use real social computing platforms - because they are more cost effective, offer flexibility, have ‘social’ built-in, and are user-driven;
• Take an abundance approach to the technology - the traditional model of IT is a scarcity mindset that tries to avoid wastage (failure is a wastage), but an abundance approach will allow you to grow organically and support experimentation.
• Put the ‘users’ in the driving seat - this really is the point of Enterprise 2.0 and if you have already followed the first two rules of thumb, you should have the tools that let you do this.
• Tap into your pool of early adopters - getting momentum quickly is always important, but you can use the fact that some people in your organisation may already be ‘Enterprise 2.0 ready’.

Mix these up with Dion’s list and we might start to get somewhere with understanding why Enterprise 2.0 projects might fail.