Finding experts is a problem. Creating a closed stagnant database is a poor solution to that problem. But creating a dynamic system is a much smarter approach. First of all you get people answering questions — which saves time and money. And secondly, by leveraging social computing tools (and staying away from emails that hide conversations) it becomes clear who the experts really are. Employees might want to answer questions to demonstrate what they are capable of. And administrators can manage the system so that no one person gets too many questions…But having this kind of system solves a set of business problems that the old database would never solve.

Content comes in different shapes and context. Some needs ‘locking-down’, other content is ‘open’, while elements develop as it is pushed, modified and enhanced. There is not a ‘one solution’ fits all process flow within each stream, nor within each site area within a community site. Some communities have areas which are controlled by a central team, and no-one else can update/add. They also have areas which are open and require no authorization or approval to publish and enhance. Other communities are more centrally controlled with some locked-down areas.

What we do provide is a ‘governance structure’. Generally speaking the governance structure provides visible ownership for each area of a site. The owner is best placed to determine the requirements of content production for their area – from the user, risk and stream perspective. When we sit down with each ‘owner’ we then structure the content flow process and build as required. An overall ’steering group’ would ideally determine the overall suitability of the workflow, however, experience suggests this is more a rubber stamping process.

Decisions that affect innovation are no different than other decisions. They are based on information. How much information, what kind of information, whether a company chooses to use certain information, and how well a company interprets available information, is the key to decision-making success.

Information isn’t always easy to obtain however, which is probably a good thing actually. Information – having it and not having it – becomes the basis for competitive advantage. You can only hope your information is better than your competitor’s.

In collaborative organizations, people interact spontaneously regardless of level, role, or region. This encourages broad input into product and service development, process improvements, and marketing campaigns. Rather than present a marketing plan or campaign after it’s already developed, why not get sales, finance, and corporate communications involved early? Then the plan has cross-functional buy-in baked right in. And it’s likely a stronger plan, because it reflects less-insular input.

In the product design arena, command-and-control organizations inform factory workers what they’ll be building and how. These workers are on a need-to-know basis. Collaborative organizations engage factory workers in the design of the products and the manufacturing processes. This breaks down the barriers between product development and manufacturing and reduces the impact of silos. The collaborative approach also reduces product development time and ultimately produces a better result.

Harold Jarche: “Social computing in knowledge-intensive workplaces“

The lines are blurring between marketing and training just as they are between learning and working. The connectivity enabled by social computing gives us an opportunity to identify overlapping areas and redundancies in organizational human performance support. A unified support function, focused on really serving workers and helping them grow, could significantly reduce the 77% of CLO Magazine survey respondents who feel that people in their organization are not growing fast enough to keep up with the business.

Every department in the enterprise is part of the problem:

• IT: for locking down computers and treating all employees like children, closing off a wealth of information, knowledge and connections outside the artificial firewall.
• Communications: for forcing employees to use approved messages that do not even sound human.
• Training: for separating learning from work.
• HR: for forcing people into standardized jobs and competency models that do not reflect the person.

It’s time for all departments to become part of the solution.

Here are three authentic concerns from real world adoption of enterprise micro-blogging that my colleague Henrik Gustafsson has captured and which he also helped me answer. Some of these concerns might sound strange to long-time and frequent Twitter users, but you need to deal with these kinds of concerns when trying to facilitate broad adoption within an enterprise.

1. Platform hijack

“A few very active people have hijacked our internal micro-blogging platform”

Can a free and open platform such as a micro-blogging platform be hijacked by a few individuals?

My answer to this is no. And yes.

I answer no because the platform as such does not exclude people who want to participate. Anyone can grab the mike and join the conversation, or start a new one.

I answer yes because even though the platform does not impose any restrictions to participate, we might impose these kinds of restrictions by our attitudes and behaviors as individuals and/or collective. Though, the subjective feeling of not being included that some individuals might have does not necessarily mean that other people deliberately exclude them or don’t want them to participate.

The fact that some people are more active than others is no surprise and nothing strange. This is illustrated by the 90-9-1 principle, which claims that in social groups, some people participate more actively than others. Social participation tends to follow a 90-9-1 rule ((cc) Jake McKee & 90-9-1.com):

Everyone is free to participate if they want to, and choose how they want to participate. If someone just wants to listen, then fine. If someone wants to create, then just do it.

2. Emergent spam

”Some posts are beginning to look like spam.”

Does spam exist on a platform where it is each individual who chooses whom to follow and listen to, and where you can use tags to filter out the stuff that is relevant to you?

Yes, it does. Temporarily, until you adjust and fine-tune your filters. That is something you must learn to do, and to continuously. If someone you follow is mostly babbling about stuff you don’t really interested in, then unfollow that person. No damage done. Someone might start following you, and then choose to unfollow you. You need to do the same if you want to avoid a feeling of information overload (or spam if you like). That is the name of the game, and what you are doing is just calibrating your filters.

Anyone is free to opt in and opt out from any conversation that takes place in public. You need to choose which ones are important and valuable to you. No-one forces anyone to follow someone else. And you can’t (at least you shouldn’t) force anyone to follow you.

3. The risk of being misunderstood

“What if I will be misunderstood?”

All communication brings a risk of being misunderstood. That is because the purpose of the communication is to be understood. If the communication fails, it means per definition that you have been misunderstood.

The graphic “10 levels of intimacy” below by Ji Lee can be used to illustrate a communication continuum from the most intimate way to communicate to the least intimate.

Twitter is a communication platform that’s comprised of just about 100 million people located around the world. And unlike any other network, when you’re on Twitter, you’re in the same room with every other person on Twitter. It’s like a pulse of what people are collectively thinking about, and so in some ways, becoming a kind of global consciousness. We’re connecting with peers around the globe and exchanging tips for business practices. We’re connecting with educators and researchers and scientists and discovering new ways of teaching and learning. We’re being exposed to each other’s perspectives on the world, and our capacity for empathy is expanding.

Sure there’s misinformation, spam, and useless junk too. Just like anywhere. It just means our ability to scan information and critically evaluate its validity will grow to be an ever more important skill.

If you’re using social media as part of a new vision for your organization (social business design, social CRM) or as an addition to your personal learning network (PLN) or to empower people or to build and spread ideas, you get it. We’re growing into a global human network, and we’re able to begin constructing our own reality. ‘The way things work’ isn’t set in stone, it’s a social agreement. So many aspects of the way we work, the way we live, and the way we relate to each other are products of the systems that are currently in place. When we start experimenting with new ideas put together in new ways by new groups of people (and failing often), eventually we’ll figure it out – it’s how innovation happens. At so many levels, as a species, we are at a pivotal time in history where we can collectively design a new future.

Employees shouldn’t waste too much time on the intranet; social media wastes time; the Internet is a productivity drain. These are common refrains and concerns expressed by many executives, albeit the less educated ones, generally of an older generation, nearing or past retirement.

The exact same concerns were made about employee bathroom breaks, mealtimes, telephone use, etc. General Motors, that great stalwart of financial prudence, used to hire people to time employees when they used the bathroom.

“With Web 2.0 applications creeping into the enterprise — with or without IT approval — it’s obvious that ingenious information workers will find tools to help them accomplish their work no matter where those tools come from,” says IDC.

…job satisfaction is just one return a company gets from networked employees. Zappos encourages its employees to network on the job, resulting in a reputation for stellar customer service. Employees engaged in their social networks can also reduce the cost and improve the quality of recruiting. It can surface issues the company needs to address. It can generate ideas for new products and services. It improves employee productivity.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased in the third quarter of 2009 by 8.1%. That’s a far more credible number than the back-of-the-envelope calculations Pandora, Websense and other monitoring-and-blocking companies use in their scare campaigns. In fact, it reveals the productivity claims by these companies as an outright lie.

Yet these tactics continue to influence managers, as evidenced by the fact that most companies block access despite the fact that blocking is contrary to their own self interests.

Leaders need to realize that organizations that encourage their employees to network during work—guided by clear policies and improved business literacy—will experience success that eclipses that of organizations that block access.

It’s not a question of employee entitlements. It’s a question of smart business practices.

1. Colleagues / People

The people you surround yourself with are always important. There’s a difference between work and private life here; you don’t always get to choose your colleagues the same way you choose your friends. But for me, the people around me is the single most important fun factor.

2. Openness

To have the “official” permission to speak ones mind is something that is concidered pretty obvious in society (democracy and such…), but how is the situation inside Your Corporation Walls? By allowing people to speak their minds it’s my strong opinion that these open companies will innovate and ellaborate a whole lot more than others.

3. Extra curricular activities

To do stuff that is not directly work-related at work has always existed; anyone for teambuilding? But it does the job of bringing colleagues closer together, to talk about other stuff for a while.

4. Freedom with responsibilities

The above is a classic mantra from my upbringing in the Swedish school system. However I like it a lot. The individual can choose how to complete a task as long at it is done and in time. I am given huge freedom, but at the same time I have responsibilities. At work as well in society.

5. The right tools to get the work done

This is important from anyone from a construction worker to a webmaster. If you’re not given great tools your capacity will suffer. In my off-work life I have a wide array of “tools” at my disposal to get my evenings and weekends to be as much fun as possible.

When I first registered my Twitter account – in September 2007 – I must admit I didn’t get Twitter. I didn’t see how Twitter could be used, probably because the only use I did see was people using it to tell others what they were doing without any real purpose behind it. What they said wasn’t really interesting or usable to me, even if it what people I knew. They were writing insignificant things lacking a meaningful context (”eating a sandwich” or “working”). So my Twitter account remained inactive for almost a year.

The change that made me see real value in Twitter came about a year ago, when the people I had learnt to know and appreciate from their writings in blogs started to have conversations on Twitter. At that time, I had been a frequent blogger for a couple of years and had been conversating with other bloggers via my own blog and via the comments on their blogs. Gradually I noticed that the conversations which previously were held on blogs and blog comments were moving to Twitter. So I started following the people whose blogs I subscribed to on Twitter. I hadn’t search for them before on Twitter, but now most of them exposed their Twitter name on their blogs.

On the Twitter platform, I observed that the conversations were much more frequent, personal, informal, interactive, positive, and open than in the “blogosphere”. Despite the 140 character limit, they were actually getting richer. I also noted that people shared much more of the interesting things they had encountered than they did via their blogs (thanks to lower barrier to entry on Twitter).

From that point on, which is now almost a year ago, Twitter has rapidy evolved to my main platform for knowledge discovery and exchange, professional networking, and idea generation. The feeds I subscribe to via Google Reader are now complementary to the tweets from the people I follow on Twitter. This is evident from the fact that I check Twitter before Google Reader. This is a major change from just a year ago.

My blog is still very important to me. It is MY platform. It is where I develop thoughts and ideas further, where I sum up what I’ve learnt and experienced, and where I aggregate the best readings I’ve encountered via Twitter, Google Reader or elsewhere.

Twitter, on the other hand, is OUR platform. It’s the place where I and anyone else with a Twitter account can have conversations on equal terms. Twitter builds community and brings me closer to other interesting people and their ideas, wherever and whoever they are.

It’s simply fantastic. This is one of those stories I tell with a passion, and which makes me a true believer in the power of social software such as micro-blogging both outside and inside of organizations (the latter has special challenges). My lesson from using Twitter and getting value from it is the following:

1. Find a purpose.
2. Find people with common interests, and hopefully the same purpose.
3. Learn the basic rules and “code of conduct” by observing others.
4. Share thing that you find interesting and valuable.
5. Start engaging with people you find interesting.

1. Participation / the number of people who share the common interest or purpose must be big enough to give life to a thriving community.
2. The community needs to be characterized by openness, trust and sharing.

Most high-tech companies have made significant investments in tier 1 business applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), product lifecycle management (PLM) and customer relationship management (CRM). While these systems provide access to structured, transactional information, they do not facilitate the unstructured, ad-hoc collaboration activities where people interact with people and where business decisions are made.

The biggest challenge in 2010 and beyond, therefore, will be to integrate PLM, ERP, supply chain management and other structured, transactional frameworks with tools and processes that facilitate unstructured collaboration. By embedding unstructured collaboration tools such as unified communications, live meetings and online chat within these structured, transactional systems, manufacturers will be able to increase business agility through an array of benefits ranging from improved innovation to more rapid decision making and faster time-to-market.

One of the key tools for unstructured collaboration is social computing…In 2010, we will see the adoption of social collaboration tools increase significantly, as more manufacturers will look to integrate social computing tools and platforms like SharePoint into their business processes, linking internal communities and external communities. These unstructured collaboration tools can help high-tech businesses gain visibility into customer needs and wants; improve customer support and satisfaction; and facilitate knowledge-sharing throughout the enterprise

People like to use email because they feel they can reach exactly the person they have in mind and I think they like the “attachment” functionality that gives them the peace of mind of knowing they’ve handed off their document to exactly the person who should have it. But email’s effectiveness breaks down quickly, in my experience, when you don’t know precisely who you should be talking to.

To me, the necessity and opportunity of social computing as a corporate communication tool is revealed by the strong showing of face-to-face. People want to have productive back-and-forth exchanges with precisely the right people who can help them and a face-to-face conversation does that. But what about when you are not in the same physical location and yet you need to collaboratively exchange expertise with someone else, or a group? That’s when social computing tools can fit the bill because they are web-based approximations of the face-to-face dynamic.

On Friday, I expressed doubt whether Twitter will ever enjoy mainstream adoption like Facebook…the more closed Facebook has continued to thrive because it marries microblogging (or status messages, which are longer and have threaded comments) with other social sharing features in one constant stream without the need for redirection.

For this reason, I believe microblogging, integrated with other social software, will be more useful for the general populace as a technology at work than it ever will in their consumer life. Here is why enterprise microblogging will affect more people, and their day-to-day, than Twitter:

1) You Know the People

2) Communication Problem is More Real at Work

3) Privacy Provides Comfort to Share

4) Value Becomes Evident Faster

Globalization will eventually show that it too was driven by technology change but the ramifications are far from being felt. Today, Americans are blaming big business and our government for causing this recession but underpinning this is the transformation where work is getting done faster and cheaper in other places around the world.

With this new global economy questions emerge to who should be in control, who should lead, who is responsible for ensuring our place and many other question emerge. For a country born on democracy, it’s interesting to see so many looking to the government for that lead when in fact it’s us that must lead this next transformation. Unfortunately, our life styles are killing our drive to succeed.

This CIO article highlights 3 enterprise microblogging case studies – two of the case studies are about large technology companies (still interesting, but not necessarily reflective of everyone’s experience). However, the other example describes the experiences of St. Louis Public Radio in the US, which only employees around 33 staff.

For me this reflects my own personal rule of thumb that its not just the size of an organisation that makes enterprise social computing useful, but the structure of the organisation and how these different roles relate to each other.

While the marketing consultants focus on buzz and engagement, their in-house colleagues are trying to use social media to change how companies operate. The goal of Enterprise 2.0, a descendant of the “knowledge management” movement in the ’90s, is to reroute the information traveling through corporations, undermining rigid hierarchies.

Many argue that a fixation on hard numbers could lead companies to ignore the harder-to-quantify dividends of social media, such as trust and commitment. A Twittering employee, for example, might develop trust or goodwill among customers but have trouble putting a number on it. “There is this default assumption that return on investment is the correct measure for everything,” says Susan Etlinger, senior vice-president at Horn Group, a San Francisco consultancy. “Everything needs to monetize within 12 weeks, so we can understand that we’re successful. But frequently the thing they’re measuring is misleading.”

This can lead to confusion. The risk is that a backlash against the consultants’ easy promises could reduce social media investments just as the industry takes off.

Browsing is a complementary method to searching which can be used when you have av vague idea about what you are looking for, or when you just cannot describe it. Just as browsing is a complementary method to searching, micro-blogging can be seen as a complementary method to targeted communication methods; phone, e-mail, chat, sms and so on. You micro-blog when you don’t know specifically who to address with something. With micro-blogging, you simply turn to your followers, your groups and the entire community instead of targeting specific individuals.

As the adoption of internal micro-blogging grows at my own company, I am constantly discovering new use cases for internal micro-blogging. Here are a few of the things people use it for:

• Asking collegues to help them find information about something, such as a report, method or customer
• Asking collegues to help them with a problem they have with a specific software, their computer, or something else
• Finding collegues with a specific skill, experience or knowledge
• Building intelligence about something, such about what is currently happening at a customer or what we have previously done for that customer
• Sharing ideas and finding collegues willing and able to help them develop them further
• Getting help to find the right translation of a term that they use within their profession

The benefits of internal micro-blogging becomes quite clear as soon as you start to use it. But, I have also learnt that, for some people, internal micro-blogging can be intimidating. Why is that?

I believe it has to do with the fact that positions and titles matter also online. Some people are simply very afraid of making mistakes, such as saying the wrong thing, when their boss could be listening. So they see it as a much safer strategy to not say anything at all and just listen in on other conversations without joining them.

It all has to do with our fear of transparency. Micro-blogging is a transparent way to communicate, way more transparent than targetet communication methods like email. When micro-blogging, you just have to be a little more careful about what you say and how you say it than when you email people. Email is perceived as “safer” in this respect because it is much less transparent. It allows you to say more sensitive things, assuming that you trust the people that you communicate with (so they don’t forward your conversation to other people). The point is that a lot of people will do anything to hold on to email and continue to use it for conversations which are not senstive and which could be very valuable to others who are not on the list of recipients to join or access.

Comparing micro-blogging to email also highlights another potential benefit of internal micro-blogging. The lack of transparency with email also means that you can use your work email for communicating and discussing highly sensitive things, even very private things. Or just bullshit and complete nonsense. This highly contributes to the email mess that most of us have to deal with on a daily basis. Internal micro-blogging is, just as blogging, a way to keep the important stuff than can be important to others as well from being buried and lost in your email inbox.

To me, one of the greatest promises of Enterprise 2.0 and tools such as micro-blogs is that we can use them to tap into the hidden talent of a large organization. The people who don’t get to travel a lot, or who have the time needed to develop a strong informal internal network, can start to make start building a network of their own. The people who don’t have access to established forums other than their project and department meetings can share their ideas, opinions, experiences and knowledge with other collegues across organizational and geographical borders.

The sad part, from my experience, is that most of the people who don’t speak up at an internal meeting won’t do it online either. Although I am sure that some of them will speak up as time goes by and they get more used to this new communication arena, it will take time. And they won’t change their behavior voluntary. It will take peer pressure.

“The Importance of Online Workplaces” by Larry Cannell:

When working online we need places to to gather information, to communicate with colleagues, to learn from others who have encountered similar situations, and to work within teams or organizations with shared goals. As a result, we gather information in files on our computers, organize folders of messages in our e-mail client, or maintain binders full of printed reports from business applications on our desks (because they take so long to retrieve otherwise).

Online workplaces are involved in virtually all information- or knowledge-based activities within an enterprise. By improving online workplaces, an enterprise can significantly increase the performance of these activities. However, the goals of an online workplace need to go beyond automation. When aligned with supporting culture and business practices, online workplaces can provide the basis for sustainable competitive advantage. The source of this advantage comes from the intellectual capital that can be captured and reused. This is illustrated in the following conceptual model.

The efficiency of completing repeatable processes and transactions is the focus of workflow systems and transactional systems. In the interest of decreasing cycle time, both of these system types optimize how individuals and groups serve business processes: The process comes first and the worker is subservient to the process (cue Pink Floyd music). However, this “process first, user second” design does not work well for the many ad hoc activities that make up a typical workday, in which the user juggles multiple variables and gathers information as needed. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid call these two different modes “process” and “practice.”

“The Real Business Value of Social Networking” by Luis Suarez:

Seth Godin…once again…nails it, as far as I can tell, on what the real challenge is for social networking to flourish in the enterprise world.

In over the course of a little bit over two minutes, he gets to share some really good insights on what the real business value of social networking is all about. And guess what? He doesn’t do it through a definition, nor through stating hard facts none of us can (nor will!) relate to! Ever. Instead, he shares it through stories. Stories we can all relate to.

Speaking of stories, I found this video with excellent advice on how to tell stories via Tom Graves (@tetradian) on Twitter:

“The Social Media Fear Factor” By Rachel Happe:

There is plenty to be anxious about in considering using social media for business.

Many look at all their valid fears – whether they are as simple as having un-edited content in the public eye or whether they are concerned with law suits – and decide it is too much to take on. On the other side, I hear a lot of social media enthusiasts recommend a ‘Just Do It’ approach. Like many things, the reality for people concerned about the ramifications of using these new communication mechanisms is somewhere in the middle.

Things you can do to practice:

• Use Yammer internally
• Train and encourage people within your company to have personal blogs. Run competitions.
• Introduce smaller work groups to wikis
• Implement an enterprise-wide social network (emphasis on social)
• Create group blogs to comment on industry news and events that are only accessible internally.
• Pretend to blog for an external audience before you deploy an external blog.
• Form communities of practice internally and learn how to ‘manage’ them

You get the idea. Practice is critical.