10 Reasons to wiki

I’m speaking at the Potomac Forum at the Willard Hotel (Washington, D.C.) this Friday, October 16th. Its a how-to workshop focused on government – how to create a social media campaign, how to create effective policies, how to blog, how to engage with communities, and my subject – how to use a wiki.

It used to be that wikis were techie things where you needed to know a markup language or worse to use them. But times have changed.

The last time I spoke at the forum I asked how many people in the audience had never used a wiki – so – this workshop will focus on two things – 1) the mechanics of how to actually set up and use a wiki, and 2) why you might want to.

After defining what a wiki is, I’ll walk through some of the many uses of wikis:

1. Wiki as team roster.

2. Wiki as document organizer

3. Wiki as issues list

4. Wiki for FAQ

5. Wiki is the document

6. Wiki to get organized

7. Wiki to aggregate resources

8. Wiki to build a portfolio

9. Wiki to plan

10. Wiki as knowledge base.

Next, I’ll cover some rules of engagement:

1. Make sure you have a purpose, and that you’ve expressed it to your co-contributors. Focus is the key to success.

2. Capture your roughest thougts. If you do this, you’ll always be giving yourself something to build on.

2. Be appreciative when someone else contributes, and let them know.

3. Don’t forget to go in and prune.

4. The earlier you share, the more collaborative you can be. Once you or your colleague have formalized your thoughts, its much harder to change them, and much harder to accept well meaning critisicm. So – share while you’re still open to feedback, and comment while they are. Its very hard to put hours into creating something, and then have people point out its flaws. Its much easier to remain open to new ideas before you’ve invested too much in developing them.

Last, I’ll cover some of the features to look for in a wiki, depending on the purpose you’re after, and show some examples of great wikis.

If you’d like to learn more about how wikis can bring a new level of efficiency to a team, then register here for the two-day event, or leave me a note in the comments here.

If you’re new to wikis, or  just love a really good explanation,  this video is surely the best basic introduction to the wiki concept:

Filed under: best practices, collaboration, social media, team building , collaboration, how to wiki, social media, team efficiency, wiki

Bigger isn’t better, and email is no way to work

I spend a lot of time these days trying to articulate the value of enterprise collaboration. This because I’m now working on a surprisingly good “social collaboration” product for enterprise. (Why surprising? Cause its out of the box functionality and usability are excellent (hours to deployment) and yet it scales like gangbusters. this is another story. check it out here).

Here’s the thing. Enterprises get big to benefit from economies of scale – the idea that the more you do something, the more efficient (cheap) you can make it. This works well for many things – manufacturing, transactional services like banking and insurance – businesses that produce things that are the same every time.

But a bigger, and ever growing, component of business success is about problem solving, idea sharing, strategy and insight. This is true in knowledge enterprises: Intelligence, Military, Technology, Medical, but its also true in manufacturing companies that need to come up with product strategies, marketing strategies and process improvements for those ever important cost savings.

This knowledge work does not benefit from efficiencies of scale – but it could. The concept of crowd-sourcing is ultimately the concept of scaling thinking.

There are a few fundamental issues, however that companies face that social collaboration tools can actually solve – without having to look into the future and take a leap of faith in the alchemy of collaboration.

1. Email is a really bad way for groups to communicate with one another.

Email is a really great way for two people to communicate, or for one party to send announcements to others, but if you’re looking to have a multi-way discussion, where multiple people are reviewing, revising, asking and answering questions, then email really stinks. I’m guessing that I don’t have to give you too many examples of why – but just think about the last time that you got edits on a doc from more than one person, had to integrate them and recirculate for approval. How easy waas that? And guess what? This is how most work is done in most businesses. This simple problem in itself is, perhaps, the very best reason to choose your favorite social collaboration tool and use it. Your entire company will thank you – once they get the hang of it.

2. Emailing documents around also stinks – nobody knows which is the latest version, those powerpoints are big, too easy to loose them.

again – the email stinks thing, but it really does. And maybe you have some document management software – how well is this solving this problem for you? Its part of the problem, but not nearly enough.

3. When I leave, I’m gone.

Most of what I know isn’t in a document – its in the conversations I have, the comments I make and the documents I create. When I’m gone, I can leave you a few gig of email and docs somewhere – good luck sorting through it all and finding any value in it. But if that’s all part of a collaborative community, it becomes searchable, it remains in context, and can be easily connected with other people in the company for continuity.

4. When I arrive I’m lost.

How long does it take you to figure out how things get done in a company? The org chart can help. Some. But its not nearly enough. Knowing who knows what and who does what is a matter of building relationships and trying things out, and having an effective network of people to query and being able to see the results of other people’s queries. Social collaboration tools can be an enormous help – without them, you’re basically stuck with email and the org chart. Maybe a “helpful” HR orientation. If you’re insanely lucky, you might have a mentor or a manager with 5 minutes time to spend with you.

5. I have no idea what you’re doing.

I go about my job and you go about yours. Sometimes we’re trying to solve the same or similar problems, searching for similar resources and compiling them together. Sometimes we’re communicating with customers, planning events, initiatives, research. And we don’t have any idea that there’s someone to share the work with, or to grab some great stuff from, because we have no idea what the similarities or synergies are. We might hear rumors through other people, and if we’re lucky, we hook up and get some value from the relationship. If we have time and luck. Businesses need to do better than depend on time and luck.

So – I love nothing more than to discuss the long term effects of collaborative cultures and make assurances about how you’ll innovate more and increase agility and capability once you’re fully down the road with social collaboration. But its hard to prove that’s what happens. And its also unnecessary.

All you need to know, is that email is the biggest waste of time – not because you’re getting unimportant messages, but because it doesn’t help get the necessary work done,  it doesn’t help people know what’s going on, and ideas, information and documents that travel via email get lost without fail.

Social Collaboration tools do not need to solve every challenge you’ve ever had, and they won’t. But they’ll get you out of working in your inbox. All it will take to prove it is a good days work with them.

Filed under: Uncategorized , collaboration, e2.0, email stinks, enterprise 2.0, ROI of e2.0

Uncle Sam wants to share: Social Collaboration in the Public Sector.

The public sector is leading the charge in adopting collaborative technologies. Why?

1. They are mission focused – their goal is not profit, but service. In the case of the real leaders and innovators, the military and intelligence communities, their mission is life and death. They are keen to embrace methods and technologies that further the mission.

2. They are complex bureaucracies – the Federal government employs some 200,000 people. Policies and processes can be complex and less than agile. People within these bureaucracies must rely on their knowledge and relationships to improve effectiveness.

3. They must do more with less. The mission of government rarely shrinks, but their resources do. The resourcefulness and dedication of civil servants is what drives them ever forward.

4. The leadership of these agencies recognizes the talent within and the complexity of the mission.

5. Obama told them to. He’s demanding a new perspective of government effectiveness and how technology can enable it.

So – who’s sharing what? A very short list of examples, pulled from a very long list of initiatives:

1. The intelligence community is sharing via A-Space and Intellipedia, and its next generation, Intellipublia, among other initiatives.

2. The army is sharing via The Warfighters Forum and has instituted a set of 12 Principles to support collaborative, knowledge-growing, organizations.

3. The State Department is working to get embassy personnel up to speed quickly and retain knowledge as they rotate through different assignments with Diplopedia.

4. The Navy is using Tripwire, among other tools.

There are a dozen more great examples of government adopting collaborative concepts and technologies. What are they hoping to gain?

1. Effectiveness

2. Situational awareness

3. Retention and reuse of work, knowledge, process and capability.

4. Leveraging the full passion of committed employees.

Join me on Friday at 1pm eastern time for a review of how some of Open Text’s latest technology helps meet these objectives with an easy to use, easy to deploy application to support collaboration in the public and commercial sectors. Go ahead and register here.

I hope to hear from you on this webinar, and here, on this blog about your challenges, successes and questions about how social collaboration can make your organization more effective.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Focus big F, little f

I come back from my summer vacation to a desk stacked to the ceiling with stuff. Six months of expense reports, “strategic initiatives”, docs that need to be written, projects in every phase of completion, and, having actually struggled through the paper work, I’ve sat down to look at the article I’ve promised I’d flesh out on measuring the ROI of Collaboration.

So, I’m researching productivity, ROI calculations, historical information for comparison, etc and I’ve come back to the conclusion that sure, you can do an adequate job of measuring ROI in terms of it saving x% of time and money, etc. But the key to productivity for knowledge workers is Focus and focus.

Focus – knowledge work is often a swarm of activities – strategies, requirements, research, communication, project management, follow ups – an endless and endlessly evolving to do list which can be difficult to remember track or manage. This leads to two focus problems – little f focus – where I get interrupted so many times, I can’t recall what it was I was in the middle of, till I close down a few windows at the end of the day and find the email or doc I was half way through when I got distracted by twitter, a link, an email a visit, need to go to the loo, etc.

Then there’s big F focus. The big F focus is about working on the right stuff so thatyour labors, and that of your colleagues, actually makes real progress toward a particular goal. Both are important, and both can actually be aided (or hindered!) by collaboration and collaborative technologies.

Big F focus requires careful thought, direction and a keen sense of the value you’re trying to bring to your audience. Big F is about leadership – which is obviously not a technology. Or is it?

Leadership can’t be created by technology, but it can be supported and enhanced. Technologies that enable better communication amongst and between people in an organization give leaders an opportunity to better understand what is actually going on in the organization, and to better communicate goals. It means that leaders can keep focus on what matters by keeping goals and progress visible, by constant discussion and reaffirmation of direction, and by continual refinement and adjustment in response to what the team learns and the world does.

A lot of attention and press is given to leadership blogs, but there are very few (though certainly some) companies where the leadership and corporate culture support this kind of ongoing dialog about goals and how to meet them. Goals are announced annually, and much ado is made around creating some powerpoint slides. This is good – but as the year unfolds, thinking and circumstances evolves. Some of this evolution occurs in the inner sanctum of the leadership – more occurs in the broader team as they go out and on. The challenge is to bring these together so that the team and leadership can be in a constant feedback loop, constantly optimizing, focusing, aligning.

The ultimate value of collaboration in organizations is this ability to support Focus and focus, while leveraging the collective intelligence to fulfill the objective.

Technologies help here by enabling creation of a unified world view for the team, needs to keep goals, tasks and deadlines organized and in front, and support unfettered dialog amongst and between people so that they can see each other’s thinking unfold.

But tech is not the key issue. For this to work, organizations need to foster a culture where dialog is encouraged – where questions are thoughtful, where bad news is as welcome as good so that course correction is expected, welcome and planned for. Professional teams trust and respect each other and share (and foster) the thrill of a common mission and constructive debate.

So – how do we move from the maelstrom into focus? The key is communication. When I know what we’re working toward, and who’s doing what and how I can contribute, when the dialog and discussion around it is lively, I am focused. Multiply by the number of people on the team, and in the organization, and there you have it. Simple, right? Not. But shared workspaces, fluid communication, and general awareness help. A good collaborative tool supports all of these.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Can social Media Make Big Businesses Smaller?

I read a phrase recently on the Oracle Fusion blog – and I can’t find it again to cite, so apologies. But the essence tickled the question of why big business ocassionally gets knocked out by small business, and how social media might just possibly help big business compete against those agile, tight, “unencumbered” little guys. Personally, I’ve done the 5-guy startup right up through the 20,000 guy behemoth, so this idea resonated with me.

Small companies have advantages and disadvantages. Amongst their disadvantages are the need to get customers fast or die. The need for funding from outside firms, establish credibility, weak brand identity and recognition, and probably a score of others. Individual customers hold tremendous sway and can often derail things (not that this doesn’t happen at big companies).

Small company advantages run a gamut of issues, but I’m going to focus on the cultural and communications issues. They include people who know each other well, every member of the team is tightly connected to every other. Each member of the team is fully bought into and engaged in the vision. Each team member has a voice that is heard, has a personal investment in the outcome, and understands how his or her contribution matters.

In a (typical) big company, vision is diluted. Relatively few people have met the CEO, let alone heard him “unpack” the vision (outside the keynote speaches), the CEO knows few of the 10,000. There’s the appearence of “secrecy” at the top – the workforce believes that there’s a “strategy” and a “reason”, but that they aren’t valuable enough or trusted enough to know what it is. They hesitate to speak on behalf of the company, because they aren’t confident that they know the right thing to say.

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week, Marcia Conner of Pistachio Consulting asked “how many of us hire untrustworthy people?” It was a great line, but the fact of the matter is in a big company we often have no idea who we’re dealing with.

So – enter social media. Few companies will adopt social media in order to create a tighter team and culture where people know each other. A few companies will “get it” and invest, some will recognize the value of grassroots efforts and institutionalize them, but most Companies will adopt social media in order to solve a specific, urgent business issue: waste,  inefficiency, travel costs and distributed teams. Military and Intel will adopt because of the urgent need for rapid information diffusion and identification of expertise (that’s another post).

Social media tools will be adopted to solve problems, will do a pretty good job, and then there will be the secondary effects: transparency, faster innovation, a more cohesive corporate culture, employees who are more engaged, and feel they know the leaderships thinking intimately, and a host of other second order effects that we have some anecdotal evidence of, but have yet to really nail down.

If these secondary effects are half as common as we expect, then they may create the ultimate combination of big and small company advantages. Tight, focused, engaged teams who identify strongly with the mission and their contributions, while having the influence, stability an resources of a large company.

I’m not 100% sure if that’s a good or bad thing for the world as a whole, but I’m sure that the people running and working with those large companies, as well as their stockholders will be very happy, and small businesses will again be figuring out how to compete with the big guys.

Filed under: Uncategorized , collaboration, corporate culture, enterprise 2.0, social media, social media effects

Measuring ROI for Enterprise 2.0 and Collaboration

I’ve just returned from the Enterprise 2.0 conference. (I took the long way home through Waterloo).

It was fun, I got to meet some of the twitterati, and show off Open Texts’ very cool new products.

Much of the conversation there, however was about the ROI of the various initiatives around Enterprise 2.0 – and there was not a lot of satisfaction found in the conversation. So I’m sharing my thoughts on the subject.

First lets define some terms. Enterprise 2.0 generally refers to two major initiatives – one is to use social media to create and improve relationships and communication with the marketplace. The other is to faciliate knowledge worker efficiency within the organization.

I’m talking about the second case – what Open Text likes to call the Social Workplace (vs. the Social Marketplace).

So – ROI. How do you measure the ROI of knowledge worker efficiency. There are basically 2 ways to do this.

One is to try to measure the value in general. This is very hard to measure unless you equate social media to email, the phone, the intranet – they’re modern tools of work, and we don’t measure the ROI, its just how business is done. This really only works in one of 2 situations. Either you have a visionary senior leadership who just feel its strategic and important, and they want to do it regardless of a fuzzy ROI. The other is if you have a small grass-roots effort that can show demonstrable results, and those results can be assumed to grow with further adoption across the organization.

The real thinking behind this is that you acknowledge that you aren’t sure what will happen when you enable a collaborative culture within your organization, but your pretty sure some good stuff will happen in the realm of efficiency, innovation, and solving as yet unpredicted problems because people within the organization will have a much better chance of connecting the dots.

The second way to measure ROI is to recognize that Social Media and collaboration tools are enabling technologies that can solve certain business problems. You don’t measure the ROI of the technology, you measure the ROI of sovling a specific problem. So – if you don’t have the organizational culture or backing to take the leap of faith that method one requires, you need to identify a business problem – teams are spread across the globe, email trails are out of control, information silos are causing lots of redundant work – probably you can come up with your own list.

The ROI in this case is the ROI of solving that specific problem. What’s your business problem? What is the cost of that problem? How will you know if its solved?

That’s your ROI.

Filed under: Uncategorized , ROI of Collaboration, ROI of Enterprise 2.0, ROI of Social Media

We are “The Sims”

I like to think that sometimes my posts are pithy and clever, but I know that sometimes they are a bit abstract. This is usuallly cause I’m using this blog as a way to work through what i’m thinking about. This is one of those posts.

Back in the late 90’s, i spent a few years studying, designing and implementing “agent based simulations of complex systems “. I was studying emergent behavior. These were somewhere between “boids” and The Sims in their depth.

I was doing an incredible amount of online research, and realized that if I ever wanted to do related research it would be very difficult to re-trace my steps, bookmarks not withstanding. If I wanted OTHER people to be able to retrace my steps, it would be very difficult to share HOW I’d found what I’d found, in addition to the what.

These two issues put me on a tear to understand tacit knowledge.

So – I wrote a whitepaper that I titled the Self-Organizing Knowledge Manager. The idea was this. People are not very good at tracking things, but computers are. we could get a computer to track where we go and how we get there and what we do when we’re there, and amek it so we can retrace our own steps and share our pathways with others. You wouldn’t have to be explicit about what the relationships between the linked items were, just the fact that there were links at all. People are really good at divining meaning – unlike computers. So leverage what each does best to capture and share tacit knowledge. Simple, right?

Then I asked smart people how to build software that would track click paths, what files were open at the same time, cuts and pastes, etc. They told me I’d need a database as an operating system and it didn’t work that way. hmph.

So the punchline here of course is that Social Media tools are the perfect substrate for capturing this information. Micropublishing, in the form of wikis, blogs, tweets, etc, are capturing the little bits of insight and information, connecting them together – along with the people who contributed – to achieve a self-organizing knowledge system.

So – now people can

a) track the links between people, objects (content) and each other, capturing a ton of tacit knowledge in the process

b) enable people to participate, much like the “agents” in my old simulations, to create emergent behavior.

Unbelievable. I was reminded about all this stuff, and how (perhaps surprisingly) relevant it is in understanding social media. David Armano’s engaging and relevant talk about how his effort to help a homeless family connects the dots.

So – what do we know about tacit knowledge, and what do we know about emergent behavior.

1. We know that most people think those terms are inscrutable.

2. We know that neither are easily tangible or predictable

But – if we apply the study of complexity theory, emergent systems, and what Stephen Wolfram calls “A New Kind of Science” (the first couple hundred pages of which are fascinating, but while I love Stephen (i know him from way back) he could use an aggressive editor, the book weighs about 10 lbs (and thanks to Salinger for teaching me the art of the multiply embedded flourish of parens – there’s a quote somewhere)) and the study of communities and collaboration, then, I think we can help enterprise, government and society develop a language for expressing ideas in this area, and start to really pursue the possible.

I promise my next post will make more sense.

Oh – the title – “The Sims” is a very popular computer game which is, in essence a sophisticated agent based simulation. It is unpredictable in its behaviors and outcomes, and yet elucidates cause and effect very well. Try it and you’ll see. My obscure point here, is that the read-write web has turned its participants into real-live actor agents in a giant simulation game. We can’t predict its outcomes, but we can learn a great deal about cause, effect and the important drivers of various outcomes.

Filed under: social media, web 2.0 , collaboration, complexity theory, emergent behavior, social media, tacit knowledge, web 2.0

DAM basics writ funny

if people understand  media management at all, its usually in its most basic form – an asset repository where you back it up and make it searchable via metadata. this concept hardly makes the ante in the digital media space these days, but this mundane concept is amusingly portrayed here:

Filed under: media management , DAM, media management

Social software is a (good) trojan horse for Enterprise 2.0

Social Software in the enterprise can have great direct value: human relationships between companies and their customers, and improved collaboration and process within organizations.

However, I think there are 2 important trends of which social software in the enterprise is just the first hint:

1. Enterprise software needs to work for people, not vice versa. Social software is reminding people in enterprise that software can be usable and useful at the same time. Most enterprise software is very powerful, but dramatically underutilized by people who spend more time trying to avoid it than use it. This will no longer be tolerated.

While many companies are putting prettier faces on enterprise software tools these days, this should and will lead to a fundamental change in how software is defined – by talking to its users – not business or IT “subject matter experts”, but actual users.

2. Social software is the beginning of the next generation of corporate scalability and management. Today’s hierarchical management by objectives (sort of) type of business structure evolved over the years from the “divide and conquer” school of thinking. Which is good. But at a certain point “divide” becomes “fracture and scatter”.

Social software – and the cultural changes that make it valuable will change the basic form of corporate structure and leadership. Leadership will play an even more important role -that’s leadership in the real sense of engaging people with your goals and your ideas in a way that makes them want to give their all for it. But authority will be different. Decisionmaking will be different. The opportunities provided by an intense dedication to continual improvement will change the short term, siloed, hide anything that looks like bad news, status quo that has held so many companies and so many people back for so long.

What will this look like?

IT departments will be given new agendas – they’ll start to be evaluated on technology adoption and satisfaction, and the efficiencies gained. They’ll be recruited as partners in solving hard problems. I think they’ll like it.

Senior management will share more information, decentralize decisionmaking and expect a much higher level of efficiency from their teams. And everyone will benefit from that.

Filed under: Uncategorized

creative, connective and compounding collaboration, revisited

A couple of months ago I introduced some words to describe different types of collaboration – what they can achieve, what the obstacles are. ..

Here’s the next generation of that thinking of what I believe are the 3 fundamental models of collaboration….

1. Creative – this is the kind of collaboration where you have an explicit team, and an explicit goal “Marketing launch of new product” or “widget redesign” or “budget planning”, or whatever.

you have a group of people who all have some stake in or some contribution to be made to the outcome.  you sit (literally, virtutally or figuratively) at the table working out how to get things done, then you go off and do them, checking in at intervals on progress and issues that come up.

2. Connective – this is the “connecting the dots” problem – While working your day to day work, you “hear” from the extended organization in ways that let you find similarities, serendipities, trends and patterns in information or ideas.

The most infamous example of this type of collaboration is in the intelligence community – ever since 9/11 it is a security imperative to make sure that information silos don’t prevent people from identifying important trends and patterns in information. Like there are bad guys learning to fly airplanes and get visas into the US.

This is one area where the new concepts in social media are driving fantastic progress and innovation, but also one of the most deviously tricky problems to solve. Its extremely difficult to find and measure those things that might exist, but you can’t be sure.

In spite of this interesting challenge, progress is being made.

3. Compounding.

This is the idea that if you can find it, you build on what has been done before.  So – if I know what resources Joe used to respond to an RFP, then I can refer to the same sources for similar information. If I’m bringing a new analyst up to speed, I can give them access to all the people, resources and assets that I routinely use to get work done, enabling him to begin to do the same. Instead of creating a new powerpoint template, i can focus on the content of the darn thing.

Also challenging and less well understood than you might think, the goal of compounding is what spawned the ill fated “knowledge management” initiatives of the 90’s which attempted to codify the un-codifiable.

98% of knowledge in an organization is tacit – that is to say not officially documented, tabulated and indexed. So trying to find it in traditional ways is difficult. Again, social media has made dramatic contributions here – collecting the tiny comments and questions, the who asked who answered and what did they refer to that heretofore has been lost in email trails that go cold and die….

more on what to do with these ideas later….

Filed under: Uncategorized