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By Jay Cross, Internet Time Group, http://jaycross.com Password for contributors: jay2007. Contents.
Preface The business press, executive conferences, the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Newsweek, Stephen Colbert, the Manchester Guardian, and other leading voices can’t stop talking about Web 2.0 and collaboration. You’ve read the stories: The web is now Web 2.0, the read/write web. Wikipedia is a user-written encyclopaedia written entirely by volunteers. Facebook and YouTube are growing faster than the web in its meteoric growth phase. Google’s P/E ratio is astronomical.
This is all well and good, but it provides scant guidance to the business manager who wants to take advantage of the technology.
Managers need to know the opportunities and the pitfalls, applications and benefits, tricks of the trade and where to begin. I set out to document the experience and best practices of businesses using the new technologies.
Let's try to keep the focus on what managers need to know. They can find instructions for setting up a wiki any number of places.
Bear in mind that our readers will agree with Harold Geneen when he said, “It’s an immutable law of business that words are words, promises are promises, but only performance is reality."
Please join in. Show wiki love: add to and improve what's here. All of us are smarter than any of us. It's good karma. Password for making entries: jay2007.
 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
P.S. I'm posting my updates in brown. (jay)
This has never happened before People working together are vastly more productive than people working in isolation.
Collaboration is about building relationships that foster ideas, intentions, and interests. Co-workers learn from one another. They inspire one another. They build on each another’s ideas. Small groups of them can move mountains. A collaborative enterprise with shared values and common purpose can change the world.
Workers innately know that when people work together they produce greater results and enjoy their work more, too. Until quite recently, collaboration was not easy, especially if distance was involved, people didn’t have access to the same information, or a worker couldn’t figure out who was the right person to contact.
Those barriers are fading fast. Software and networks that support collaboration are in place and cheap, too. Workers complain about silos; social networks enable them to walk through silo walls. Companies are losing customers disgusted with unhelpful help desks, phone labyrinths, and not understanding what’s going on. Transparency and self-service are the cure.
In business, collaboration is a means to an end, and that end is prosperity, longevity, and growth.
I asked Harvard Business School’s Andrew McAfee, who coined the term Enterprise 2.0, why he thinks social software will transform the business world. He told me that today’s collaborative technologies can knit together an enterprise and facilitate knowledge work in ways that were simply not possible previously. They have the potential to usher in a new era by making both the practices of knowledge work and its outputs more visible.
What’s holding us back? It’s no longer the technology. It’s the people and their organizations. That’s what this project is all about. How are companies working with their people to take advantage of the power of the collaborative web? Why might you want your organization to embrace web 2.0? To collaborate is to work jointly with others or together, especially in an intellectual endeavour.1
Business has already squeezed the big process improvements out of its industrial systems. For many companies, the benefits of collaboration and networking are virgin territory. The upside potential is staggering: people innovating, sharing, supporting one another, all naturally and without barriers. The traditional approach has been to automate routine tasks in order to reduce cost; the new vision is to empower people to take advantage of their innate desire to share and learn.
Web 2.0, the “collaborative web,” makes file cabinets and hard drives overflowing with email obsolete. Members of a group can share information and make improvements to one copy that’s virtually available to everyone. Workers learn to remix rather than re-invent, and having everyone read from the same page overcomes the danger of mistaking obsolete information for current. Distance no longer keeps workers apart. As we remove obstacles, the time required to do anything shrivels up.
Only fund collaboration that increases revenue, improves relationships with customers, cuts costs, grows employees, expands innovation, communicates values, streamlines the work process, or helps execute strategy. As Eugene Kim has noted, “There is no such thing as collaboration without a goal.”
Wikis in Plain English is a short video explaining what wikis are and do. If you like this, you'll probably like these others from Common Craft: Social Bookmarking in Plain English, RSS in Plain English, Social Bookmarking..., Blogs..., Social networking...
Following the suggestions here may improve your odds of success but there’s no guarantee. Successful collaboration requires dedication, continuous small improvements, and cultural support.
What’s in it for us? Companies are using social software to:
Compared to old-style groupware such as Lotus Notes, social software is simple, unstructured, emergent, inherently transparent, and can scale.
The balance of this paper tells what companies did to achieve benefits like these.
Changing the nature of how people relate to one another at work is not easy. People, organizations, and corporate cultures have different views on being open, taking risks, trying new things, realigning responsibilities, learning new technologies, and trusting one another. What works in one organization may fail in the next.
The safe approach is to begin with a few small-scale experiments, score some successes, and replicate them in other areas of the company. As the technology takes hold, policies are drawn to enforce common standards and safe behaviour.
We’ll examine the three stages by analogy to the children’s tale of The Three Bears.
The Three Bears Once upon a time, there were three bears: Baby Bear, Mama Bear, and Papa Bear. Baby Bear was curious, enthusiastic, and a bit unruly. Mama Bear was practical, cautious, and experimented in the kitchen. Paper Bear spent most of his time hibernating but was a powerhouse once he woke up and smelled the coffee. The bears mirror the stages of adoption of online collaborative environments.2 You’re about to get a bear’s eye view of collaboration, its business value, and potential pitfalls, at each stage.
This report is a snapshot of a field that sees new discoveries daily. I hope you will collaborate with me to expand the report’s examples and relevance. In time, we may weave together a one-stop shop that helps us all work together for a better future. Sounds like a job for a wiki.
What is new with the web? Originally the web resembled a brochure; you could read it but not much else. Now the web has morph into a stage. The audience are becoming the actors. The set is flexible. Most of the acting/collaboration is improvisational. The platform does not determine what takes place on stage. It’s an environment.
Harvard’s Andy McAfee says “Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”
Figuring out the nuts and bolts of the technology is the easy part. If you want to find out more about the technologies underneath social software, check out Ross Dawson’s wonderful diagram of the collaborative web on the next page.
I’m going to use the terms social software, web 2.0, and collaborative online environment interchangeably. It’s all a mix of blogs, wikis, RSS, mash-ups, search engines, tags, widgets, and bots. The medium is not the message.
Baby BearWhere does it start?
Happily, the costs of setting up a web 2.0 application are trivial. Furthermore, applications are simple to program. You no longer need to be a programmer to produce a prototype for show-and-tell. Many a prototype has been developed in a matter of hours.
Baby bear is the application champion. If he is low in the organization, he probably begins with a simple, free, online wiki to deal with a local problem and builds support by pointing people to the wiki. Baby bears come in all forms.
In addition to the local enthusiasts, social software projects have been initiated by:
The U.S. Department of Defense spends the most money on training of any organization in the world, yet a simple web application started by two company commanders on their own a has become the most important source of collaboration and knowledge sharing among officers in Iraq.3 The officers had been classmates at West Point shared quarters in Iraq. In the evening, they would talk over the day’s events and reflect on what they had learned. Sensing that other officers might want to join the conversation, they started a blog. Rather than go through channels, they didn’t ask for permission. (Anyone can set up a blog for free in less than five minutes.)
The blog spread virally among company commanders, becoming more valuable as more voices chimed in. Soon the blog, Company Command, was a must-read. Unlike material coming from the Pentagon, the conversations in the blog told what had happened only hours before; they were in everyday, conversational English, not bureaucratese; they focused on need-to-know information for survival, not something one might use next year.
In another case, a staffer in a large company thought an in-house Wikipedia would help employees find information and maintain a corporate memory. A technology evangelist downloaded free software and implemented a wiki behind the firewall. It soon became the bridge among five divisional silos and the go-to place for finding things out. Volunteers populated the system with handy information from all corners. New hires get up to speed by spending a day exploring the in-house information center.
Bottom-up collaborative environments all over the corporation tend to improve functions that are already in place. Criteria for selection: pick the low-hanging fruit.
When small projects gain enough attention to appear on the corporate radar, responsibility for selecting and implementing social software is delegated to the IT department, either to take the prototype forward or perhaps because the IT press and CIO community say it’s the thing to do. CIO magazine, once sceptical of the web as an intrusion onto IT’s turf, is now singing its praises, e.g.: One of the driving forces behind Web 2.0 is the virtual office—teams of far-flung experts collaborating online to create a whole greater than the sum of its contributors4. A KM system that’s "actually being used"—this kind of language hints at the skepticism both users and CIOs have had about KM for years.
One final bit of good news: Users say the new, simpler KM tools make it easier to justify the investment to your fellow C-level executives. "It can be very difficult to make a pitch to senior management about why knowledge management is important, because it’s not real to them," explains Northwestern Mutual’s Austin. Now, she just shows them blog users engaged in explaining their projects to coworkers.
Enterprise 2.0 tools make it easier to share and organize information. Tagging and rating provide a straightforward way to find content and make judgments about what to look at. Blogs and wikis are natural collaboration and communication platforms. Social network tools help staff find the right individual or group of people. Enterprise 2.0 has the potential to provide knowledge and content management in a surprisingly cheap and easy fashion using Web-based tools.5
Sometimes IT becomes involved because it controls everything to do with computers. This can have disastrous consequences if IT takes full control. Implementing online collaboration deals more with people issues than software decisions, but IT people solve IT issues. A typical selection process may involve setting up a matrix of vendors and features, yet features are unimportant compared to ease of use and other factors. Social software is often lightweight, but inexpensive can translate as unimportant to IT. The upshot is that often the customer view is not taken into account.
Little bear needs IT’s help in enforcing the standards necessary for efficiency. IT should lend its expertise and influence in security, compliance, and building a foundation for growth.
If not an IT decision, a business user with a problem to solve probably initiates the inquiry. Sometimes the goal is meta, for example, increasing innovation. More often the issue is immediately practical, for example onboarding 1,500 new staff or tracking plans for 75 customers. Criteria for selection: solve a burning business problem.
Sometimes executives mandate experiments with social software because they’ve read about it in the business press or hear success stories from colleagues. Their interest may be faster cycle times, unleashing corporate wisdom, consolidating an acquisition, or other over-arching need. Criteria for project selection: focus on strategically important areas.
Is Baby Bear’s organization ready for this? At this stage, all we have is a prototype. Nonetheless it’s a good idea to test the water before jumping into the pool. At least that will keep you from diving into hot water.
Consultant, online advocate, and champion of NGOs Beth Kanter has lots of experience assessing whether an organization is ready for online collaboration.6 Beth thinks you are not ready if:
On the other hand, you may be prepared if you want to:
Selecting a starter application Your mileage may vary, but in our experience, initial projects have a better chance of thriving if:
New Haven? Sixty years ago, producers staged new plays at the Shubert Theater in New Haven, Connecticut, before taking them to Broadway. No critics were in the audience, so if a major overhaul was required before the official release, no one was the wiser. Similarly, if your first prototype bombs, it’s nice to be able to sweep it under the carpet and begin anew.
To maintain focus, the owner of a project should prepare a document in response to these questions:
Display your answers prominently on the wiki, blog, or whatever tool is involved.
Commitment by team members It’s great to begin a long-term collaboration with a face-to-face meeting. Either in person or virtual, social bonding comes before business, for that’s the platform on which the work will be built. Begin with games and getting-to-know-you exercises. Give people time to talk and become familiar with one another.
Social connections remain vital throughout the collaboration. People work best with people they know. Encourage people to share information about themselves. Post photographs of participants. Pinpoint their locations on a map..
It’s important that collaborators are working under the same set of assumptions. Discuss each of these areas and ask for individual commitment to them.
Be prepared for push-back. Workers who see collaboration as hindering their work rather than supporting it will be reluctant to join the effort. Organizations that are accustomed to a single viewpoint (usually top management’s) can become rattled as other voices begin to speak. It’s useful to recruit a band of early supporters to help sell the value of the project.
Online collaboration driver license You cannot learn to swim without getting in the water. You will not appreciate collaborative technology without writing entries in a blog, taking part in a wiki, and subscribing to an RSS feed.
If you haven’t experienced these things, don’t go into denial. Yes, you really need to do them. No, logic is insufficient for grasping what is going on. It needn’t take more than an hour or two, spread out over a week or two to experience these things. Find a private place to practice. Trust us, it’s painless. And you’ll be rewarded with not only your online collaboration license but also a big ah-ha of understanding.
To earn your automobile license, you have to demonstrate that you can drive the vehicle. Likewise, you don’t really qualify for a collaboration driver license until you’ve taken part in a successful collaboration.
Hints on what works with social software7
Start-up case study Here’s how one company went about kicking off a web 2.0 collaborative program.
A large defense contractor in the Southwest employs thousands of people in precision work where the cost of failure is almost unimaginatively high. The Operations Services Group had formed an eight-perform committee to come up with ways to streamline training. Committee members read my book on Informal Learning. In August I flew to headquarters for three days to test an approach for selecting an appropriate place to begin.
The initial morning was a little helter-skelter, because for the first time anyone could recall, flooding had cut off the power to the main plant, and nine thousand workers were told to evacuate the building and head home. In another building, members of the committee gave me an overview of the company and took me on a tour of a spotless factory floor where massive weapons were being constructed. A few others joined us for Q&A about the company and about web 2.0-based learning.
Overall, employees see their company as a great place to work. Turnover is insignificant, and half of those who leave rejoin the company. There’s frustration with dated procedures but the group has a can-do attitude. Due to a downturn in the defense business, few people were hired in the 80s and into the 90s, resulting in a group of old hands and a group of newcomers with little in-between. Economically, times are good. This firm is seen as the quality producer in the industry.
That afternoon, we discussed undercurrents in the organization. People selected two or three pictures out of several hundred I’d brought with me that reminded them of some aspect of work here and explained why. Among the issues raised:
We surmised that the organization was in transition, neither rigidly clinging to the past nor rushing to catch the future. Few employees have a long-term vision.
The morning after next, our group met to plan next steps. We had a number of candidates for starter projects:
Go public with what our group is doing, invite participation, and look for linkages to our sister groups looking into knowledge sharing and reducing rework. (Just do it!)
Toward the end of the day, the engineer for a large program described an area just begging for collaborative resolution. She has to make plant visits to dozens of suppliers to ensure that they’re following proper standards downstream. Many other divisions call on the same set of suppliers.
Why not share information on the suppliers to everyone who works with them? Keep a perpetual record of visits and discoveries on a wiki. To ice the cake, include RSS feeds that report whenever the supplier’s name appears in financial, legal, and business reports on the internet.
How to get people to contribute to your wiki. From pbwiki.
Sample Baby Bear Projects In-house Wikipedia. Example: Intel Intelpedia. Employee downloads free software and posts it behind the firewall. Employees post 5,000 pages of need-to-know company information. Within six months, more that 10,000 page look-ups. Intelpedia has become the place to go to look up what an acronym means or what a particular project looked like. The site is one of the first stops for new recruits, for exploring Intelpedia puts everything in the concept of the company’s procedures and values.
Frequently Asked Questions for temp workers. Example: T. Rowe Price. At tax time, 1,500 workers are brought in to answer incoming customer tax questions over the telephone. They post rules of thumb to a shared read/write site. This speeds up customer service by two minutes per call. Benefits exceed $10,000,000.
Create shared space for cooperative projects with other organizations. Intel and the National University of Ireland created the Innovation Value Institute (http://ivi.nuim.ie) to develop unifying frameworks and roadmaps for IT. The IVI brings together 30 high-powered members, including Chevron Texaco and the Boston Consulting Group. The issue the IVI faced was finding a collaboration platform that would work across all its different members. As a result, it's easy to plan meetings, share the latest version of documents, and create a history of the relationships.
need to add additional apps from pbWiki
Mama Bear
Network growth
Imagine how this can happen in an organization. The first nodes appear as the company experiments with a few small projects such as coordinating online project groups or making it easier to find information with a “Wikipedia inside.” New hires are accustomed to going wherever they wish in a network; imagine that they begin communicating between silos. HR realizes that the company-pedia can accelerate onboarding new employees. Customer service improves as everyone gains access to corporate resources such as who does what and how to find them. Replacing multiple versions with a single source of information cuts bureaucracy and chops email volume back. The growth of corporate connections feeds on itself.
What problem should we be solving? Baby Bear was looking for simple applications that showed the potential of online collaboration. Mama Bear is out for the biggest bang for the buck. She will have to explain her choices to the bears with more seniority. It’s sensitive.
Here’s a list of organizational dysfunctions and opportunities for improvement that others have solved using enterprise 2.0. Mama Bear will use the list to set her mind to work; she will share it with the other bears to get their insight. Which of these things will return the most value to the corporation?
Not learning
Unenthusiastic, sluggish staff
Underdeveloped organization
Suboptimal execution
Substandard revenue
Deficient service
Sustaining momentum As the organization’s use of collaborative software crosses the chasm from specialty item to important business process, focus shifts to keeping collaboration vibrant, disseminating lessons learned, and informally benchmarking performance.
Companies that have made the transition suggest these practices for maintaining momentum after initial enthusiasm wears thin:
Conclude project teams with written evaluation
Participants suggest “How we can make this better”
Don’t skimp on investment. This is all cheap compared to the alternatives.
Use bots to send periodic reminders about what’s going on
Encourage (or enforce!) tagging, making things searchable and thus easier to use
Now this is how it is supposed to work!8 I am in debt to Dan Bricklin9 for sharing this podcast with Toby Redshaw, corporate VP of Motorola. Look at these stats:
Here are some other pieces that I thought were important:
Examples of wiki use range from broad areas like digital six-sigma or some of the key engineering efforts which have hundreds of pages and many contributors to a pre-sales factbook for a certain type of network architecture component that they sell which serves a small, geographically dispersed group. Their content in the system totals almost 5 terabytes (!) which includes lots of text as well as engineering diagrams, etc.
To sustain momentum, they prune old and unused content, sometimes having a blog that lasts just a very short time. They work hard to keep it all fresh and up to date. They have knowledge champions in various areas who help do this. He feels these "domain owners" are an important part of facilitating the "quality" of the information and its organization. This is internally oriented, which has everybody with the same mission of advancing the company's goals and under the same governance to keep out bad behavior, etc. This is not Wikipedia on the public web.
Toby sees an evolution towards "enterprise mashups" with business process management, enterprise information management systems, structured data management systems, data warehouses, and wikis. Process management data that shows a choke point or other problem in a process can link back automatically to a search of wiki data to find prior material relating to that situation and even identify individuals to be called in. They are trying to use both structured and unstructured information.
He sees wikis as an important part of taking advantage of the brain power they get with acquisitions, by throwing the new people into their systems to add their knowledge.
These systems have replaced "...decisions based on very narrow amounts of knowledge...What's been eliminated is people making a lot of mistakes that other people have already made for them...cycle times have been improved..."
How “pull” gives the user choice
Their lives are not their own because they feel they must deal with every incoming email or announcement. Every day it’s as if an evil genie dumps boatloads of information, price increases, questions, recall notices, changes to plans, trade regulations, competitive threats, and email into our offices to greet us in the morning. Most of what we receive is not relevant to our needs; it was the product of a thoughtless cc: or mass mailing. As with spam, the sender incurs no cost but the recipient pays dearly in time and distraction.
One way out of this quagmire is going after the information you need rather than taking all the information that is pushed on you. My first blog post of 2007 said “The tide will turn, saving humankind from drowning in diversions. At the point of being overwhelmed by repeated shotgun blasts of infobits, people will turn the gun around and hunt down what they want.”
We’ll be able to select what mail, email, television programs, phone calls, and reports we want in our lives. We’re accustomed to taking whatever is delivered; in the future, we’ll take what we choose. Media, software, training, and telephones will give us the ability to filter what gets past our personal firewalls. I’m not predicting that pull will replace push everywhere we get information, just that the balance will shift more toward the pull end of the spectrum than the push.
Big benefits come with a price tag. Most often, maintaining a wiki requires someone to prune dead branches, bring new items to the front, and consolidate overlapping topics. Someone else has to keep collaboration focused on the objective. Up front, an experienced wiki architect can increase the odds of success.
Trust As social networks become more visible in the organization, they are certain to attract scrutiny by senior managers who never received their Online Collaboration Driver License. Giving every worker the ability to write things into documents that can be seen by all looks like a formula for chaos. And won’t some bad actors muck about, spraying the files with digital graffiti. Time and time again, the answer has turned out to be “no.”
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has addressed the issue of vandalism countless times. He draws an analogy to opening a new restaurant. This is America, so the restaurant is going to serve steak. Some steak is tough, so he will provide patrons with steak knives. People can stab one another with knives, so he will seat his guests in cages. Whoa! Time out! You’ve got to trust the people to behave in a civilized manner or give up on the restaurant idea entirely.
And so it goes with open collaboration in the corporate world. Employees don’t turn into monsters just because they are online. Everything submitted carries the name of its author. What better way to lose your job than by acting foolishly in front of all to see.
Nonetheless, because this is a new medium and because you’ve got corporate attorneys assuming the worst, it’s wise to set expectations and post guidelines. Here’s one organization’s policy10 for participating in the in-house wiki:
You can be assured that IBM paid its legal staff handsomely to give these user-recommended guidelines the stamp of approval. Hint: use your eyes; plagiarize.
IBM’s Policy on Employee Blogs11 Excerpts:
In the spring of 2005, IBM bloggers used a wiki to create a set of blogging guidelines that would protect both IBM bloggers and IBM itself as the company formally entered the blogosphere. The guidelines were endorsed by IBM and initially posted internally -- then our bloggers shared them with the world.
Responsible engagement in innovation and dialogue Whether or not an IBMer chooses to create or participate in a blog or a wiki or other form of online publishing or discussion is his or her own decision. However, it is very much in IBM's interest – and, we believe, in each IBMer's own – to be aware of this sphere of information, interaction and idea exchange:
To learn: As an innovation-based company, we believe in the importance of open exchange and learning – between IBM and its clients, and among the many constituents of our emerging business and societal ecosystem. The rapidly growing phenomenon of blogging and online dialogue are emerging important arenas for that kind of engagement and learning.
To contribute: IBM – as a business, as an innovator and as a corporate citizen – makes important contributions to the world, to the future of business and technology, and to public dialogue on a broad range of societal issues. As our business activities increasingly focus on the provision of transformational insight and high-value innovation – whether to business clients or those in the public, educational or health sectors – it becomes increasingly important for IBM and IBMers to share with the world the exciting things we’re doing learning and doing, and to learn from others.
Guidelines for IBM bloggers: executive summary Know and follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines.
Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate communications. IBMers are personally responsible for their posts. Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time—protect your privacy.
Identify yourself – name and, when relevant, role at IBM – when you blog about IBM or IBM-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM.
If you publish a blog or post to a blog outside of IBM and it has something to do with work you do or subjects associated with IBM, use a disclaimer such as this: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.”
Don’t provide IBM’s or another’s confidential or other proprietary information. Ask permission to publish or report on conversations that are meant to be private or internal to IBM.
Don't cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.
Respect your audience. Don't use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, etc., and show proper consideration for others' privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory – such as politics and religion.
Find out who else is blogging on the topic, and cite them.
Don't pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes, and don't alter previous posts without indicating that you have done so.
Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective.
Wiki Use Policies at Sun Microsystems12 Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz is the most high-profile executive blogger in the business world. Read his blog13; it’s an eye-opener. Sun’s policy encourages employees to post to blogs and wikis: that’s how people will come to know the company.
Sample Mama Bear Projects Unifying a distributed organization. Example: Intrawest. The real estate development firm’s 250 employees work from seven locations. Collaboration online has yielded ideas worth millions. Employees maintain the shared collaboration space online; use is pervasive. Online personal profiles help workers get to know one another and form friendships that makes interactions faster and more fun. In their own words:
To spur social innovation and business development, IBM set up a social network where thousands of alumni and current IBMers can connect, communicate and collaborate in variety of new ways: online, in-person and in Second Life. More than six thousand have signed up. By extending the meaning and value of "being an IBMer," the firm is reinforcing IBM's core goal of being the world's leading innovation catalyst. Members gain contacts. Big Blue hopes to foster lifelong relationship with an extended community of “high-caliber people who share an IBM heritage.”
The technology scouting group of a large software company set up a collaboration space online to keep up with companies that might fill current or future needs. Self-service look-ups replaced a deluge of email. At the same time, information was no longer lost in people’s inboxes.
Four years ago the technology scouting group, which kept up with companies that might fill their internal and their customers’ needs set up a wiki to replace their emails. The wiki meant that information was not lost. Calls and email to the Team replaced with self-service. The firm’s CTO became aware of the project and applied it to the distribution of product knowledge. Now the firm can see its 1,000 products through the eyes of the sales force, architects, developers, and engineers; everyone is empowered to add to the understanding of the product line.
Advertising agency MWW Group depends on web-based tools to better manage complex projects, track real-time news and other information updates, as well as facilitate communications with clients. Highly competitive advertising firms use innovative technology solutions differentiate their services.
Communicating with the customers of more than 1,000 lawyers spread around the globe in 18 offices can be a coordination nightmare. Customer address, status, preferences, time, and confidential data can come from marketing, legal briefs, CRM updates, or Outlook files on individual lawyers’ desks. Morrison Foerster brought things under control with an easily-updated collaborative space for processing master records.
Papa BearPapa Bear, sometimes known as executive management, has slept through Baby’s and Mama’s online collaborative campaigns. Sleep is good, he thinks to himself. Having been around long enough to be sporting an occasional gray hair, Papa’s nose tells him something important is going on. Papa Bear’s primary concern is milking online collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 for all they are worth. He knows it’s important for workers, clients, and partners to connect and collaborate. Papa Bear wants to be certain he’s leaving no honey, oops money, on the table.
The rest of the business world was hardly standing still while Papa Bear hibernated, for this is the age of networks. Collaborative software will connect prospects and sales people, customers and service, partners and product information, and supply chain with operations.
The future world of business is evolving into plug-and-play, outsourcing functions that are not core. Internet technology provides a common language for connecting business functions and processing routine transactions. “I’ll have my computers talk with your computers.” Papa Bear knows that without an online collaboration framework in-house, the company could be cut off from its customers and business partners. Also, it’s unlikely many of the people being hired right out of college would buy into the old lone worker with pencil and paper routine.
Papa Bear expects collaboration and network infrastructure to follow the trajectory of IT. At first, computing was relegated to the low-hanging fruit: routine tasks like accounting that were simple to automate with the same logic humans had already applied. In time, IT expanded to become enterprise software, an octopus hooked into sales, inventory, accounting, financial forecasting, HR, marketing, business intelligence, and vendor relations. Collaboration – relationships – give an organization the agility to adapt to change and the speed to create value ahead of others.
Whenever a bottom-up phenomenon in business evolves into a strategically vital proposition, executive management steps in to insure the firm isn’t treading on thin ice and to track to make sure the return their investment is optimal, neither too risky nor too conservative.
The world turned upside down For three hundred years, bears (and people) have revered efficiency, productivity, the accumulation of wealth, and things they could see and touch. This view of the world became second nature, so obvious that we didn’t question it. Until now.
We are in transition from the industrial age to the network era. When it’s difficult for people to make connections, knowledge and power are scarce, and a few “haves” control the have-nots. We see this top-down structure in feudalism, kingdoms, colonies, armies, and industrial organizations.
When it becomes easy for people to make connections, knowledge and power are distributed, and everyone has a say. The internet lives to make connections, millions of them daily. Connections beget connections, making the whole ever more value, and perhaps ending up a “singularity” where things happen so fast that we no longer recognize what’s going on.
No organization inhabits these extremes. Even the most command-and-control firm uses email and has internet access; the most networked still harbor unconnected nooks and crannies.
Most knowledge organizations today find themselves in this in-between state. They have one foot in the command-and-control model. New hires, at this point twenty-somethings, are bringing the ways they have been doing projects at home with them.
New recruits are refusing to work with organizations that don’t permit them to post a personal profile, use instant messenger, and connect to friends when they encounter a question. Elliott Masie tells of his disappointment with a new hire who had the continual distraction of six friends always a click away on her desktop. How could she concentrate? Then he realized that instead of having one new person working for The Masie Center, he had seven!
Look in the mirror We’re not all Motorolas or Ciscos, ready to adopt new technology at the drop of a hat. Most companies are somewhere between being stuck in the past and embracing the future. I think of organizations with the industrial-age beliefs as ice, because they are rigid. In addition to their orientation to control, ice organizations think business is a zero-sum game; for me to win, you must lose. They have a black-and-white view of the world; things are rigid; the fundamentals still apply. Secrecy is competition advantage; hoarding information is the norm.
Water companies are less sure of themselves or what the future will bring; Reality is the unpredictable result of complex adaptive forces. Nothing’s perfect; stuff happens. Cooperation is a win-win game. Relationships are all-important, and the more open you are, the easier it is to form them.
Where is your organization? Ice or water? Your answers to few questions will probably make it clear.
If your company is on the water side, you are a candidate for the transformation Andy McAfee describes.
Sample Papa Bear Projects Self-service customer support. Example: SAP. When SAP rolled out a new generation of enterprise software, its 39,000 customers soon knew more about implementing the software than SAP itself. The firm established the SAP Developer Network to enable users to help solve one another’s problems. Within three months, the community had more than 30,000 members. A year later SDN had grown to 100,000 members. Now SDN is 650,000 members strong. Customers answer nine out of ten questions asked, and they do it faster than SAP did in the past. SDN is a community of practice; members are paid in prestige, not money, for their contributions. SDN’s developer says, “Web 2.0 is not about technologies – it's about users treated as people, communication, self expression…”
To speed up the flow of business information throughout the organization, investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort adopted a “pull strategy” where workers get information when they seek it to replace a “push strategy” where information is emailed out shotgun-style. Email traffic has been cut in half. The bank is more agile and less bureaucratic.
The internet has improved the way consumers get together, find information, meet new people, save time, join groups of like-minded people, stay up to date, and more. Virtually all of the benefits of the open web can be brought inside the firewall to create an internet inside. Think of how the major technologies of web 2.0 could benefit your organization. A growing advantage of bringing net technology in-house is that web-literate employees can come up to speed in no time. (Training for enterprise software has been the number one training expense in corporate America for years.)
Murphy’s Law In the interest of getting a lot of examples and suggestions in front of you, I have focused on what has worked. One could write a longer paper on what has not gone well. Implementing collaboration online systems is not a day at the beach. Doing it right takes vision, persistence, and courage. Don’t give up; the rewards are worth the effort.
In your father’s time, workers prospered by knowing how to do their jobs and doing them. In our time, workers get along by connecting with others and staying in sync with ever-changing conditions. Increasingly, what they need to know is not in their heads; it’s a shared understanding held by lots of people. Having exceeded the limits of what any of us can understand on our own, we turn to our collective intelligence to survive.
Organizations at the top of the food chain are shucking off industrial-age thinking as best they can, but it is difficult. Since your great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great-grandfather’s day, we’ve revered efficiency, productivity, the accumulation of wealth, and things we could see and touch. The game is changing. With one foot in the industrial age and the other in the evolving network age, our organizations are being ripped up the middle. The world is too volatile to wait for it to pass over.
Never before in history has progress raced along at such a rate that children lap their parents. If you’d like to brainstorm how to inject collaborative technology into your organization, please call me or any thirteen-year old. Collaborate with them.
Author and acknowledgments
Jay Cross has challenged conventional wisdom about how adults learn since designing the first business degree program offered by the University of Phoenix thirty years ago. “I am dedicated to helping people become more effective in their work and happy in their lives,” says Jay. “My calling is to change the world by helping people learn to learn.” Jay coined the term eLearning. He co-authored Implementing eLearning, founded Internet Time Group, and served as CEO of eLearning Forum for its first five years. He is the author of Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways that Inspire Innovation and Performance (Pfeiffer, October 2006). He is currently writing Informal Learning: A fieldbook for managers. Hearty thanks to Pete Kaminski, Jeff Brainerd, and Ross Mayfield at Socialtext, Andy McAfee at Harvard Business School, Nancy White of Full Circle Associates, Clark Quinn of Quinnovation, Albert Calvet of CV&A in Barcelona, David Coleman of Collaborative Strategies, Harold Jarche of Jarche Consulting, Ross Dawson founder of Future Exploration Network, many clients who must remain unnamed, innumerable bloggers, and Learning Light’s Mark Pittaway and Steven Hill, all of whom contributed to this paper. People whose books or blogs heavily influenced my thinking include John Seely Brown, John Hagel, Beth Kanter, Juanita Brown, David Weinberger, Peter Drucker, Peter Senge, Geary Rummler, and Tom Davenport.
Research for this paper was funded by Learning Light, a centre of excellence in the use of learning technologies in the workplace and organisational learning best practice.
Useful links:
Ross Dawson's great Web 2.0 framework
Explanations of Web 2.0 technologies
Resources used in Collaboration 2.0
Mindquarry's Elements of Collaboration
Collaboration 2.0 Driver License
Industry Week reports on a study by the Society for Information Management's Advanced Practices Council (APC) on implementing corporate wikis. Here are the recommendations:
PB Wiki lists these use cases:
Project Management
Seven Strategies for Implementing a Successful Corporate Wiki
After surveying more than 160 active corporate wiki users, the APC study identified seven strategies to be followed in 2008 to ensure the sustainability and value of a corporate wiki:
The disruptive nature of wiki-based knowledge management may not be appropriate for all organizations. Those with traditional hierarchical information sharing approaches will not "get it."
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Baby Bear is intensely curious, driven to try new things just for the heck of it. Most collaboration projects begin at the bottom of the organization and migrate upward. Typically, a young internet enthusiast who knows the web 2.0 environment joins the company. She sees an opportunity to improve local performance with a blog or wiki. She takes a proposal to her manager. One hopes that the manager asks “What’s the business case?” If they decide the proposal is worthy of consideration, the next step will be to create a prototype to try the idea on for size.
Document the business case
Mama Bear is practical. She has little choice: raising a cub while holding down a full-time job is no picnic. Baby Bear was happy to conduct experiments. Mama Bear is hungry for major change. She is chasing after value. Baby Bear was a little scared; Mama is a fearless huntress. Baby Bear tried a few prototypes. Mama contemplates a network of networks that’s grows like a virus.
Metcalf’s Law posits that value of a network grows exponentially with the addition of connections. Left unfettered, network nodes reproduce like rabbits on espresso. Think, for example, of the hyper growth of the internet, the web, MySpace, YouTube, and FaceBook. Once social networks take hold, expect them to grow like topsy,. Moreover, the denser the network, the faster its cycle time. More connections make it quicker to get from one node to another.
Many workers are drowning in information and info-clutter.
Where is everybody?Page Information
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