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.

There is no single cure for email overload and Inbox Zero doesn’t claim to perform miracles. At the end of the day it’s a system, and it’s nothing without your own personal input. It might work for you and it might not. It’s important to remember that productivity systems are subjective beasts and that can be their ultimate downfall or the reason for their success.

What works for you won’t necessarily work for me. And for that reason you can’t say wholeheartedly that Inbox Zero works or it doesn’t. That’s just like saying that having cornflakes for breakfast doesn’t work. It’s simply a matter of personal preference or taste.

I've always been critical about email 'diets', although I view more contemporary efforts by Luis and Geoff to eliminate email with great interest.

Years ago I recommended the following:

• Where possible, eliminate the root cause of the problem. 
• Take control of your own inbox by managing it appropriately. 
• Lead by example and practice better e-mail etiquette and style.

At the root of this advice is that email is a communication tool that is often misappropriated as a collaboration tool. You can keep trying to fix your own inbox, but the problem is actually with everyone else using email.

The good news is that I hear more and more frequently how social business tools in the workplace do help to reduce email overload. We really have moved beyond marketing rhetoric.

I can even see it in my own work practices too - I use a combination of email (yes, its still there!), wiki, microblogging (enterprise microblogging and Twitter) and instant messaging. Of course, its the wiki and microblogging that make the critical difference, as they create a open plan workspace online where everyone can work out loud.

However, the root causes I identified originally still stand. Working out loud works best when:

• Everyone is working out loud (or at least 'in the room'). 
• People know why and understand how to work out loud. 
• Users are able to control how they consume the online open plan space.

Part of the reason for this is that its not simply about shifting communication that takes place in email to other channels. That would simply shift the location of the problem. Instead, we use different tools in the flow to deal with transient, situational and ambient communication and collaboration in different situations. See my Architected for Collaboration presentation for more on this.

Overall, this is a very different approach to the problem from the simplistic 'occupational spam' mentality. We eliminate the root cause of email overload, not the individual messages.

On a strictly personal front, I've noticed that the vast majority of personal email I receive these days comes in the form of notifications from other public social tools, subscriptions and automatic notifications (like my bank). However, the dynamic of personal use is very different from the workplace. In the workplace, we have the advantage of being able to choose the commons spaces where we will work out loud (assuming you are proactive about it).

92% of enterprise organisations using collaboration software use SharePoint and for over three-quarters of organisations (78%) SharePoint is the only collaboration technology that they use. But on average only 60% (3 in 5) of SharePoint sites are active; many organisations are clearly failing to maximise their SharePoint investment.

Research commissioned by Fujitsu. This is just the IT manager's perspective. I wonder what the users think too?

Hat tip to Michael.

What might be a bigger challenge for Australia's retailers is that they generally haven't been able to make the internet work efficiently for themselves yet. Established retailers are fumbling around much like newspaper publishers trying to work out the mix between print and internet. I've just checked the Harvey Norman site – as far as I can work out, I can't buy anything on it. Gerry Harvey tried the web and found it didn't work for him as a direct channel, so the site just exists to try to drive traffic to local stores.

This is from a column in the Sydney Morning Herald, weighing into the debate about demands from large old school retailers in Australia to charge consumers sales tax (GST) on goods bought online from overseas.

In a follow up article, they quote the Australian Retailers Association who say:

many large companies had been slow to embrace the internet. By contrast, small retailers were using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to promote their wares.

''Small retailers are getting very savvy,'' he said. ''Retailers are going to need to look at various forms of retailing to engage with their customers.''

Actually, I think this should be a wake up call for all large companies in all sectors in Australia. Over the last decade they haven't just been slow to adopt online retailing but have been slow to adopt Web technologies for many aspects of how they do business. This includes government and the non-profit sectors too. This failure cuts across how companies deal with their customers to how they enable their own staff to collaborate.

I used to think it was just the Australian pragmatic character that didn't buy into the technology hype in business. Now, I just wonder if its more a mix of arrogance and a lack of imagination that results in this failure to innovate?

It reminds me of a large Australian insurance company I dealt with recently online - when I encountered a bug, they told me that their Website wasn't designed for the latest Web browsers and instead I should have been using Netscape Navigator or IE 5.5. WTF!

Large Australian companies don't just need to start selling online, they have a decade of technology development to catch up on.

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"