Social Glass

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.

I just read Bill Ives post about Yahoo’s endeavor into the social aspect of “social” computing. They’ve assembled a team of leaders from academia to understand (and possibly shape) the direction in which collaboration markets are heading. Notably, most of the team is comprised of non-technical folks. This is an acknowledgment that Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 is less about technology and more about human interaction.

As Paula Thornton wrote, “..how many psychologists do you have on your team” as “we’re building products that should be influenced by the laws of human nature” instead of advances in technology.

Hear hear.

I thought I’d condense information I’ve gathered about Enterprise 2.0 (much of it from Rod Boothby’s whitepaper video), into a thesis statement on Enterprise 2.0.  So here it goes:

In this day and age where competition is global and products and services are cheap due to the increasing economic potency of emerging markets, innovation is the only means through which organizations can remain competitive.  Price is no longer an area where organizations can hope to compete.  They must instead foster an environment that encourages innovation and produces a constant stream of innovative services and solutions.  Many executives believe that they are the innovators for their companies, but in reality the capacity for 1000’s of employees to come up with innovative ideas far outweighs that of 10 or so top-level executives.

Most organizations have failed to tap into one of their richest assets - the tacit knowledge of their workforce. There is often a large distance between formal procedural documentation and how work actually is done. Furthermore, divisions within large companies often fail to collaborate effectively because they don’t know who else within the organization has similar interests or is working on similar initiatives, or they can’t find the information they need and end up re-inventing the wheel.

Enterprise 2.0 - the state of the art in collaborative software modeled after Web 2.0 techniques and patterns - provides an ecosystem that encourages innovation, facilitates the capture of tacit data, and creates a spirit of collaboration due to the participatory and social nature of its technologies. This allows enterprises to become more efficient due to increased sharing and discovery of knowledge, and helps enterprises maintain competitive advantage by fostering innovation from within.