Social Glass

1. Visibility = recognition
2. Knowledge workers compete for recognition.
3. Competition fuels participation.
4. Participation –> more quality information assets –> increased probability of innovative ideas surfacing.
5. Innovation = increased economic viability = happy enterprise.

Update: The “recent” article I link to in fact is not very recent at all.  It was published in March, 2006.
I’m fascinated by how collective intelligence can be leveraged to produce value to the business that wasn’t harnessed before. Ideas like prediction markets and enterprise knowledge markets are indeed intriguing. And this is why I enjoyed a recent article in the New York Times called Here’s an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas. The article cites a company called Rite-Solutions that has built an ingenious

internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or make an efficiency improvement. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the sentiments of the company’s engineers, computer scientists and project managers — as well as its marketers, accountants and even the receptionist.

The founders are quoted as saying “At most companies, especially technology companies, the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than senior management. So we created a marketplace to harvest collective genius”. And so far the marketplace has been working for them. An idea from an administrative staff member lead to a contract with Hasbro, for example.

What Rite-Solutions is fantastic, but I think it could be extended to include other knowledge items that aren’t explicitly submitted to be “traded”. Why not create a discovery application that measures statistics on content items (similar to Google Analytics) to create a value index for them. Statistics about:

• Page Views
• RSS Subscriber Count
• User Rating
• Incoming Links

could be used to programmatically generate the index. This raises the visibility of content generated by authors may not have thought to submit it to the marketplace for consideration by the broader organization and provides more comprehensive coverage of potential innovative content as a result.

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.

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.

I wrote a while ago about the “Innovation Maturity Model” and how ECM etc. is required to harness innovative ideas and turn them into corporate policy and strategy. What I didn’t focus on was all of those innovative ideas that don’t mature and the people behind them.

Essentially, businesses don’t have enough energy or resources to commercialize every innovative idea that knowledge workers might come up with. Innovative ideas must be assessed against corporate direction and market needs. Of those candidate ideas that make business sense only a few will get actual business focus.

This means discouragement - a lot of people with good ideas will never see them realized (at least with their current employer), and this poses a problem for the enterprise as continued discouragement often leads to high attrition rates.

How, then, does the enterprise create an ecosystem that produces innovative ideas when it can adopt so few? How does the enterprise keep from discouraging its bright and innovative knowledge workers?

I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to these questions and I see this as a real threat to the longevity of an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem within a given corporation.  Thoughts on this topic are most welcome.