chieftech’s blog

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.

An article I wrote for IDM magazine earlier in the year about managing email in the enterprise is now available to read in full on the Headshift Australasia blog. This was intended to be a counterpoint to technology-centric approaches to dealing with email overload, so let me know what you think.

Also cross posted to the Dachis Group's Collaboratory blog.

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.

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.