Social Glass

I’d like to direct your attention over to a great post by Rob Paterson at the FASTForward blog. Rob writes about how social software will expose people (bureaucrats) who have dedicated their careers solely to career advancement:

If social software has the power that I think it has, it will “Out” the bureaucrats for what they are and shift organizations away from self serving to actually serving the stated mission of the enterprise.

How might this happen? It will show the difference between meeting the needs of the mission and meeting the needs of a career. It will highlight the difference between people who have something to say because they know their stuff and have a passion for the work and those that have no real voice and only a passion for themselves.

Rob goes on to say bureaucrats hate social software, as:

What social software is doing is “outing” the bureaucrat. Most often, if an organization is using social software well - it drives debate and conversation. Good ideas and good people rise naturally to the surface in such an environment.

Please click over and check out the rest of the post. It’s definitely worth the read and, as my co-worker said, will “get you fired up”.

Within my organization we’re working hard to socialize the benefits of socially-oriented collaboration tools and have made great progress with our initiative. But an interesting dilemma has surfaced, and I’ve read about this happening elsewhere too (but I can’t remember where - otherwise I’d link to it). The dilemma revolves around whether an enterprise should focus its energy on promoting a single instance of a collaboration tool (i.e. wiki), or if it should instead embrace wiki federation. The inherent benefit of having everybody use a single instance is, of course, that all collaboration occurs in one spot. This makes it easier to find content and people since there’s only one place to look. From an IT perspective this approach also makes sense as it consolidates governance of the tool and makes it more manageable.

But the “single instance” approach might be more of a utopian ideal. We often talk about having a bottom up, non-sanctioned approach to Enterprise 2.0 adoption. Bottom up often entails disparate groups creating their own collaboration environments for specific needs, and the result is wiki proliferation. And I’m not sure there’s much corporate IT can do to keep this from happening.

So, pragmatically speaking, it makes sense for the enterprise to embrace wiki federation. This can be accomplished through Enterprise Search. Slap a Google Search Appliance or FAST instance inside the firewall, point it to the federated wikis, and we have discoverability across all collaboration tools. This negates the impetus behind moving the enterprise toward a single collaboration tool instance. Of course the challenge here is to keep the search index up to date with all of the new wikis that popup. But that’s why we have IT guys.

Sean McClowry, Andreas Rindler and I had a very fruitful session talking about Enterprise 2.0 yesterday. In large part the conversation revolved around recognizing business worthy ideas and turning into robust, corporate-ready assets embraced enterprise wide. I touched on this a couple of months ago when talking about maturing innovation.

Sean has done a great job creating a taxonomy for information management over at openmethodology.org (disclaimer: I’m affiliated with openmethdology through my company) and we focused mainly on how to harness assets “organically conceived” in the Enterprise 2.0 cloud by mapping them to our taxonomy of mature intellectual property without losing the crowd’s perspective on said assets.

We came up with a scheme whereby ideas in the Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem can be socially bookmarked and tagged, much as one would do on delicious. But in this scheme the user is also presented with the enterprise taxonomy, along with “tooltips” (thanks Andreas for that term) to explain the taxonomy to the user. The user then selects the category from the taxonomy to classify the idea with other corporate assets.

What’s beautiful about this system is that we get two perspectives on ideas/information:

1. A corporate view based on a pre-conceived taxonomy. This groups an “immature” Enterprise 2.0 asset with a “mature” corporate knowledge asset and prepares the former for corporate assimilation at the identified level in the taxonomy. Or, if an Editor so chooses, he may associate the asset with a different category.
2. The user’s perspective of the asset (a.k.a his tags) is not lost. So for every Enterprise 2.0-generated idea that is matured into the taxonomy we maintain the “crowd’s perspective”. This means categories (corporate view) in the corporate taxonomy will also be related to tags (user’s view).

This is an area that is often neglected when we talk about Enterprise 2.0. The process of maturing ideas often means integrating social computing (E2.0), with more controlled content management systems requiring mediation before ideas are recognized as corporate strategy, policy etc. I think it’s here that the old world meets the new.

I’ve made a lot of effort in promoting Enterprise 2.0 and in using E2.0 technologies in the workplace. I discussed in an earlier post how my team uses blogs to communicate ideas about technology trends. And we are starting to use wikis and social bookmarking internally.

But I must say my natural inclination is to write and email MS Word documents - especially when it’s crunch time and the rest of the team can care less about Enterprise 2.0 - we need to make a deadline. In fact, I’ve noticed that in the face of pressure people tend to abandon Enterprise 2.0 all together and fall back on communication methods they’re used to. Everybody uses email, everybody is expected to respond to email, and a lot of important work gets done via email.

I suppose the point is cultural change is hard. It’s hard not to fall back on old habits. But I suppose to make this work I need to be stern and fight my inclinations.

Update: Check out Lisa Hoover’s article for some great insight into Versionate (I’m quoted in the last couple of paragraphs).

Versionate, a new wiki tailored toward the enterprise, has just launched and is getting a lot of coverage. When I read about it I quickly headed over to the site and checked out the screencast. Versionate does a lot of things right, namely:

1. Simple, intuitive, easy to use UI
2. Integrated search capability
3. Strong compatibility with MS Office and other products

And it’s point number 3 that really separates Versionate from the competition. Myself and others within the Enterprise 2.0 community have long held that successful collaboration software must play well with MS Office. Knowledge workers will continue to use Word and Excel for years to come - we cannot expect them to abandon these tools immediately (no matter how hard we try). This means collaboration software must compliment the MS Office offering, and Versionate does just that.

Want to create a wiki page? Upload a Word document. Want to edit a wiki page? Edit it in your browser or in Word or in Open Office Writer etc. Want to revert back to a previous version of a document - version control is included and easy to use.

I can see a few features that Versionate could benefit from, however. These include:

1. The use of tags to compliment its folder-like categorization structure
2. Integrated blogging
3. Richer, facebook-like user profiles
4. A downloadable version (as mentioned on Techcrunch) to mitigate data security concerns as the current version follows the SaaS model

In my opinion Versionate is raising the bar for wiki software. I’d expect to see other wiki vendors following Versionate’s “play with MS Office” example in the near future.