“Knowledge used to be understood as an internal property of an individual. Today knowledge should be seen as networked communication. The network is the amplifier of knowledge. This requires us to learn new ways of talking about education, reward systems and organizing in companies, and most of all, work itself. The process of communication is the process of knowing. You can only know what you are doing in conversation. If we want to influence the process of knowing we need to enable new habits of participation and new habits of communication.” (Esko Kilpi)

“Data in the hands of a few makes for order; but data in the hands of many makes for endless possibilities.” (“The Whuffie Factor” by Tara Hunt)

“Social media is about participation, getting the entire workforce engaged and creating synergies…it’s often the relationship between the parts, their interdependence, that makes a difference.” (“Social Media at Work”, Jue, Marr & Kassotakis, 2009)

“Each communication episode provides the potential for people to learn something new about their partners, make decisions, monitor the state of the work, take corrective action, and perform other joint activities. If the communication episode does not take place, then the information exchange and joint action will not occur.” (“Distributed work” by Pamela Hinds & Sara Kiesler)

“Social Media didn’t invent conversations, it only surfaced them.” (Brian Solis)

“Throughout the primate world, social networks provide a fast conduit for innovation and information-sharing that help the group as a whole to adapt to its environment.” (“Glut – Mastering Information Through The Ages” by Alex Wright)

It takes a lot to make this kind of collaboration happen and become efficient and effective, especially when the team members are distributed in time and space and need to operate as a virtual team dependent on various technologies. This team needs to overcome barriers such as time, location, organization, culture, language, attitudes, behaviors…but I won’t get into details about those things in this post. Here I will focus on the concept of “collective collaboration”, a term which I tried to define in a previous post.

To become efficient and effective, the team needs to reach a common understanding about their purpose, objectives, tasks, roles, and so on. The only way to do this is by communicating with each other, and the richer, more interactive, and more frequent this communication is, the better are the chances for the team to reach and maintain this common understanding across time and space until their purpose is fulfilled. Obviously, it is easier to do this for a team consisting of people belonging to the same organizational unit, located in the same place, speaking the same language, sharing values etc than it is for a virtual team consisting of people with various backgrounds from different organizations from around the globe.

Over time, as the team members get to know each other better and develop a shared understanding of things, they are likely to become more efficient. They develop strong ties to each other. Their ideas, knowledge, attitudes and behavior will converge.

This also tends to lead to group think; the team members “try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas” (Wikipedia). Since they all share the more or less the same information, they eventually think more and more alike. This makes them dependent on a constant inflow of new and relevant information from their environment. Hence the need for collective collaboration; the kind of collaboration that allows the team to access all information they need from the environment – inside as well of outside of the organization they belong to – and thereby helping an enterprise avoiding such things as sub-optimization, redundant work, waste, bad decision-making.

So, the team members need to know what is going on elsewhere. Otherwise, they will most likely miss out on information that can be valuable to them and the common good of the enterprise. The problem here is that it is not easy to see and find out what is going on elsewhere in a large and distributed enterprise. Of course, we can use our informal network to become aware of other initiatives that we might depend on, but it is virtually impossible to use this network in an efficient way with traditional communication means such as phone calls, email, and face-to-face meetings. It requires a lot of hard detective work, so why would we spend time and energy on monitoring and listening to our environment unless we have a very specific and urgent problem we need help to solve?

As openness and transparency of information increases, we won’t only be able to discover new information that might be valuable to our team. We might also discover new people, connect with them, and share information directly with them. Social networking helps us extend, strengthen and use networks, providing the basic infrastructure which is needed for fast access and sharing of relevant information. Over time, we might develop enough trust in each other and develop the kind of strong ties we need to be able to collaborate in a team.

Over time, open, rich and frequent communication, sharing and interaction will help to build a sense of belonging and community, a feeling that we are all contributing to a common good. Then we might actually help each other even if it doesn’t bring any direct return to our team or us as individuals, other than the recognition we might get from our peers – and possibly increased social status within the community. This helps to build employee engagement, which makes us more motivated and productive as individuals.

For this to happen, it is that our contributions are recorded and visible to others. If our contributions are not seen, then we won’t be able to get the recognition we need to continue contributing. So, we need a platform that does that.

Andrew McAfee defines and explains the reasons for such a platform as follows:

“Most current collaboration technologies, including email, instant messaging, and cell phone texting are what I call channels. They essentially keep communications private. People beyond the sender and receiver(s) can’t view the contents of information sent over channels, and usually don’t even know that communication has taken place. Information sent via channels isn’t widely visible, consultable, or searchable. And no record exists of who sent what to whom, so channels leave no trace of collaboration patterns.”

“The new generation of collaboration technologies that are underpinning Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, in contrast, are all platforms. They’re repositories of digital content where contributions are globally visible (everyone with access to the platform can see them) and persistent (they stick around, and so can be consulted and searched for). Access to platforms can be restricted (to, for example, only members of an R&D lab or a team working on a particular deal) so that proprietary content isn’t universally visible within a company, but the goal of a platform technology is to make content widely and perennially available to its members!”

The information exchanged via channels form what I previously has described as the “dark matter” in a business.

When connected to each other, these Enterprise 2.0 platforms make up an eco-system of “information hubs” – blogs, wikis, communities, micro-blogging, media sharing, forums… – that allows us collect and maintain information in a collective way within an enterprise.

These hubs must be flexible to accommodate any kind of information that we need to share. Anyone must be allowed to access and contribute to these hubs, but participation must be voluntary. With easy access and authoring combined with the informal and organic way we maintain these information hubs, we ensure that threshold to participation is kept as low as possible so that we maximize the number of contributions.

By linking the hubs together, we are creating a user-generated, interlinked and rapidly adaptable body of knowledge which is open to everyone. The links combined with tags that we apply ourselves to the information makes it easier for us to organize the information, but also to find and discover relevant information with the use of filters.

With abundance of information, we need more than filters that allow us to narrow things down until we have relevant information. We also need a way to be alerted when there is something new for us. Instead of having to surf around and visit each and every information hub that might contain information that is relevant to us just to check if something is new, we can use signals in combination with filters to tell us when there is new relevant information available to us.

We also need a way to simplify consumption. Syndication does that for us. By making new information come to us instead of us coming to the information hubs, we save the time we otherwise would spend on navigating to different information hubs. If the information comes in a standardized format, we can also use one single way to interact with it. This means that our capacity to consume information greatly increases as we have to spend less time and energy on learning and remembering how to navigate on an information hub.

These are just some of the ways in which Enterprise 2.0 technologies and “mechanisms” can support collective collaboration within an enterprise. But the technology is just one side of the coin. To borrow the words of Larry Hawes:

“No business case will sell social software to a firm that doesn’t already value collaboration in its culture. If the ROI is needed to convince an organisation that collaboration is a good thing – then ROI is the least of your problems.”

“Many organizations have now moved beyond the experimentation phase and begun embedding social media into the way they do business,” said Victoria Mellor, CEO of Melcrum. “There is a fundamental shift happening with how information flows inside an organization. Peer-to-peer online networks are enabling real-time feedback from employees to inform decision-making, not to mention facilitating collaboration between remote workers,” she added.

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.

“Employee engagement, also called work engagement or worker engagement, is a business management concept. An “engaged employee” is one who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about, his or her work, and thus will act in a way that furthers their organization’s interests.” (Wikipedia)

“The key to motivation . . . doesn’t depend on elaborate incentive systems…on days when workers have the sense they’re making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak…As for recognition, the diaries revealed that it does indeed motivate workers and lift their moods.”

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.

No, it’s not all about the tools…But it’s important to point out, as a bookend, that tools can be strategic, or at least part of developing sound strategy.

Blogging can be a strategy that helps you reach a larger goal of awareness or reach or idea testing or personal exploration or whatever. Twitter can be a viable part of a distribution network strategy or engaging the community you have in other places. You can vet its adoption or value for your audience, test ideas, track its usefulness as a traffic driver for your website.

What’s important is that the company take the approach of testing and seeking tangible experiences that might relate to larger goals. That help provide some experience, some evidence, some immersion. A starting point.

Having a strategy isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about mapping a process to try and find them, and constantly checking progress and adjusting along the way. Sometimes, tinkering with a tool or two can be just the way to do that.

Many organisations are waking up to the fact that collaboration is a key piece of the intranet puzzle. I have spoken to many such people in charge of collaboration in their organisations and what puzzles me in turn is their lack of understanding of the culture of collaboration.

This basically means that the organisation has a preferred way of working, and this acts like a magnet, and this pulls all other parts towards it. For example, a bureaucratic organisation will attract bureaucratic technology and an open-thinking organisation will attract open-thinking technology.

Here comes the problem. Collaboration requires a different way of working. It requires attitudes, values, goals, and practices that are based on interdependent work. Not silo-based work, not workflow-based work but all-together-in-one-melting-pot-based work.

If the culture of the organisation is hospitable to the culture of collaboration then you’re going to have a fun time and you’ll be wondering what the fuss is all about. If the culture is pointing the other way around, well, you better start praying.

OK. Stop praying. All is not lost; there is still hope. There could be subcultures in the organisation that are more collaboration-oriented than others. Seek these out and embrace them. Ask them to show the light.

If no such subcultures exist (you poor thing) then you’ll have to start at the very beginning: by acknowledging that a collaboration-problem exists and being aware of the type of situation you’re in.

It’s a process, not an event.

Dating is a process. So is losing weight, being a public company and building a brand.

On the other hand, putting up a trade show booth is an event. So are going public and having surgery.

Events are easier to manage, pay for and get excited about. Processes build results for the long haul.

“Often described as the organizational grapevine, informal networks actually extend much deeper into the organization. They include not just social connections, but also the interactions used to solve problems, gain expertise, innovate, strategize, and share information. Every organization has informal networks, yet few know how to understand their dynamics and harness their abilities. This study, one of the first in the HR community, examined the impact of informal networks on change initiatives.” NEHRA, May 2009

Some results of the NEHRA study:

• 93% of successful change initiatives were led by leaders with strong or very strong personal networks
• 73% of less successful change initiatives were led by people described as having moderate or weak personal networks

In the case of informal networks, making the invisible visible will help in any enterprise initiative. Mapping networks can help to identify organizational silos, key links and knowledge hubs.

The organizational architecture and incentives affect the shape of informal networks in the organization, but also informal networks shape organizations (either in a positive or negative way) because they tend to be organized by similarity and common interests, crossing organizational boundaries (geographic, hierarchical, functional, divisional, even organizational, leveraging external contacts). Managers can influence formal and informal networks at all levels, but first they need to accept their existence and recognize its influential power. Formal and informal networks are closely interrelated and work in parallel, sometimes supporting the company objectives and strategy, but sometimes going exactly in the opposite direction.

We’re no longer limiting relationships to friends, family and associates. As our comfort and interaction increase in social networks, the relationships we forge within each reflect our interests and aspirations.

The curated micro networks we forge within each respective social network serves as a trusted community. Those who can participate or permeate these trust communities must first earn the prominence of what Chris Brogan and Julien Smith call Trust Agents – those individuals who are deserving of your time and attention as demonstrated through their actions and words.

It is these concentrated communities that ultimately form the premise for a much larger and more meaningful human network – a collection of trust networks that represent the market and exchanges for your focus, investment, participation and ultimately your actions.

With time, our contribution to the state of the social, attention, and trust economies is measured by reciprocity, recognition, value, and benefaction.

Trust is earned and its stature is representative of our collaboration and contribution over time. If the Social Web is an ocean, trust funnels into distinctive and distinguishable rivers.

A new collaboration culture has been conceived and must truly be embraced by the enterprise in order to improve current knowledge management (KM) systems. Traditional knowledge management is more about capturing knowledge through document repositories, sharing that knowledge with groupware tools, and making it accessible via corporate portals, which are fragile environments that can frustrate users. There is no time to lose; companies need to mitigate this demise of knowledge management by taking advantage of emerging Web 2.0 collaboration technologies, building a new strategy focused on social networks and the flow of knowledge between the people in them. Web 2.0 tools solve all this by means of sharing, pulling, subscribing to, and publishing knowledge, and—above all—by connecting knowledge workers, who are more willing to share their knowledge, collaborate, and innovate using tools they already know and like. These new enterprise strategies based on Web 2.0 technologies synthesize into what today is known as Enterprise Web 2.0.

The main objective of this investigation is to (1) analyze the business values, benefits, and risks of adopting an Enterprise Web 2.0 solution for knowledge management, giving a list of recommendations in terms of security, governance, legal regulations, and best practices, and (2) design a solution for how this Enterprise Web 2.0 strategy can be embraced by CSC, including a specific road map for deployment.

2. Apple Mobile Share Should Surprise on Upside Near Term

Near term, Apple is driving the platform change to mobile computing. Its mobile ecosystem (iPhone + iTouch + iTunes + accessories + services) market share / impact should surprise on upside for at least the next 1-2 years.

Long term, emerging markets competition, open mobile web (paced by likes of Google Android) and carrier limitations pose challenges. RIM likely to maintain enterprise lead for 1-2 years owing to installed base.

3. Next Generation Platforms (Social Networking + Mobile) are Driving Unprecedented Change in Communications + Commerce

Improvements in social networking and mobile computing platforms (led by Facebook + Apple ecosystems) are fundamentally changing ways people communicate with each other and ways developers / advertisers / vendors reach consumers.

Mobile devices will evolve as remote controls for ever expanding types of real-time cloud-based services, including emerging category of location-based services, creating opportunities + dislocations, empowering consumers in unprecedented + transformative ways.

In-house experts, with their specialized knowledge and skills, could be invaluable to both colleagues and managers. But often workers who could use their help in other departments and locations don’t even know they exist.

Because of an inability to tap expertise, problems go unsolved, new ideas never get imagined, employees feel underutilized and underappreciated. These are things that no business can afford anytime—let alone in this tough economic climate

The answer, we think, is to use social-computing tools.

Activities and interactions that occur in blogs, wikis and social networks naturally provide the cues that are missing from current expertise-search systems. A search engine that mines internal blogs, for example, where workers post updates and field queries about their work, will help searchers judge for themselves who is an expert in a given field. Wiki sites, because they involve collaborative work, will suggest not only how much each contributor knows, but also how eager they are to share that knowledge and how well they work with others.

Tags and keywords, which are posted by employees and serve as flags for search engines, can reveal qualities in an expert that are far from transparent in any database or directory. And social networks can help employees use existing relationships to not only reach out to distant experts but also trust them more than they would complete strangers.

Enterprise collaboration tools will be primarily Web 2.0-based with four years, posing major problems for organisations as entrenched users cling onto old-style working methods, warned a Gartner survey.

Gartner recommended firms take a softly-softly approach to introducing change to reluctant users, explaining the business reasons for the switch and recognising which model suits which situation.

Knowledge workers fuel innovation and growth, yet the nature of knowledge work remains poorly understood—as do the ways to improve its effectiveness. The heart of what knowledge workers do on the job is collaborate, which in the broadest terms means they interact to solve problems, serve customers, engage with partners, and nurture new ideas. Technology and workflow processes support knowledge worker success and are increasingly sources of comparative differentiation. Those able to use new technologies to reshape how they work are finding significant productivity gains.

But most companies are only beginning to take these paths. That’s because, in many respects, raising the collaboration game differs from traditional ways of boosting productivity. In production and transaction work, technology use is often part of a broader campaign to reduce head counts and costs—steps that are familiar to most managers. In the collaboration setting, technology is used differently. It multiplies interactions and extends the reach of knowledge workers. That allows for the speedier product development found at P&G and improved partner and customer intimacy at Cisco. In general, this is new terrain for most managers.

Social media is significantly changing the role of marketing, Knox says [Dave Knox, corporate marketing brand manager for Digital Business Strategy at P&G]. The convergence of technology, marketing and social interaction is becoming more important every day, “but at the same time, it is a new skill set for many marketers to learn.” Only 10 years ago, the marketing toolkit for a brand manager was limited to four choices (TV, print, out of home and radio). “But today, new technology is emerging every day, offering new ways to serve and engage people more effectively. At work we aim to use these new digital tools to continue to be a leader and innovator in marketing and digital business.”

While Knox is immersed within one of the world’s largest companies, he finds that social media is a valuable tool for bringing in outside points of view as well.

“When working for a big corporation, you have an amazing amount of resources at your fingertips. And you are surrounded by incredibly smart people,” he points out. “But most of these people have a similar background to you and are trained to approach problems in the same way. My blog [hardknoxlife.com] has helped me by giving me access to people with different backgrounds and views on the business world. It is a way to connect with these people outside of my day to day work and really get a set of different viewpoints on what is going on with marketing.”

Knox says by staying active in social media through his blog and Twitter, he has been able to do his job better. “My external network has emerged as my business filter, allowing me to sort through the noise and keep on top of what is really important. While it might save time in the short-term to slow down in social media, I think it would hurt me in the long term in terms of personal growth and knowledge.”

We all get caught up in working hard and in the same way. On the other end of the spectrum, we often try implementing new tools or processes with lots of hoopla and effort. Changing habits is really difficult. By following this simple plan of changing one thing, you can achieve a positive result collaborating with your team or partners.

Here are some ideas:

• Use a wiki page for all team status reports or meetings moving forward
• Assign one note taker for all meetings and rotate so that every meeting is documented with discussion points, decisions, and next steps – no exceptions
• Don’t ask any questions through emails – use a forum or other mechanism
• Use file-based documents as a last resort or only if you have to send them out externally. Otherwise, use a sharable web document of some kind

If you do any of these things, you WILL see a positive result in productivity. The point is it doesn’t really matter as long as it is one thing and meaningful. What is the one thing you would change?

Deloitte LLP’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) practice has recently released the results of the 2009 Tribalization of Business Study, which evaluates the perceived potential of online communities* and identifies how enterprises believe they may better leverage them.

Survey results indicate that while enterprises are effectively using online tools to engage with customers, partners, and employees for brand discussion and idea generation, organizations are continuing to struggle with harnessing social media’s full potential.

“While we are seeing signs of maturation in this year’s study, there are still plenty of companies who do not realize the power of communities, and others who have not yet figured out the proper approach for leveraging communities as part of their business,” said Francois Gossieaux, partner with Beeline Labs and a senior fellow with the Society of New Communications Research. Businesses are truly become social again, and companies should look to leverage the collective wisdom of their employees, customers and partners in order to innovate faster, reduce costs, and bolster their bottom lines.“