A culture of collaboration
beats a full set of Enterprise 2.0 software tools hands down, and
fortunately one tends to beget the other, because it will take both
things working together to spell survival for the modern corporation.
Collaboration
as a fact of life need not be a mind-breaking experience for the
company culture. The great surprise with most of the collaboration
tools springing out of Web 2.0 is that they are essentially quite
modest pieces of software. Stand-alone modules such as blogs and wikis
and messaging devices are things that any child can master, and the
joke is that every child already has.
Yesterday we cited
the firm that initiated a wiki system internally simply so that legacy
files created by retiring employees could be found by the rest of the
company. This turns into a theory of practice designed to retain
knowledge in an article by ex-IBM knowledge-management practice leader
Shawn Callahan:
“Knowledge retention has the wrong sound to it. It
makes you think about holding on to what you’ve got. You immediately
think of knowledge capture, which is an unhelpful mindset. Knowledge
circulation might be a better phrase because the aim, I believe, is to
share knowledge among people in the group so that it is resilient to
someone leaving.” – One of the many forces driving the need for knowledge retention practices
What performs much of the heavy lifting of
the Web 2.0 experience is the enabling infrastructure of network
protocols and communication standards. Architectural elements allow
non-technical users to connect themselves and all their dots together
in gargantuan productivity swarms.
The sheer productivity
that has ensued across the global network speaks volumes to companies
interested in reducing costs concurrently with increasing production.
So
the lessons are twofold: one, it’s the coming together of people that
realizes new wealth out of hidden potential; two, the tools are simple,
and you can start so small as to be almost imperceptible to the
existing culture.
On this second point enterprise
architect Mike Kavis in his blog at ITtoolbox deals with the politics
and culture of this element of IT development in his prescription for
“stealth” Enterprise 2.0 deployment:
“Get a group of early adopters together and implement
a few Web 2.0 technologies like wikis, blogs, document tagging, etc.
and measure the benefits. Once you have most of the major kinks ironed
out, invite others to participate. Once you have data to prove your
business case, then go to the senior executives and sell them on Web
2.0. The senior executives are typically very smart people who
understand a good business case when they see it. The further up the
chain they go the more focused they are on the financial aspects of the
business and they tend to get further removed from technology. It is
your job to show them the value…” Web 2.0 – Build it and they will come
We’ll examine more of the details of
collaboration transforming the knowledge of a company, and how this
turns into fresh capital. For now we should finish this look at the
mechanics of the process with an old warning we’ve seen leveled at CRM itself, namely, not to think the tools themselves are the answer alone.
Portfolio management VP Anand
Sanwal has raised a fiery debate on the notion of “Toolism”, as he
calls the unrealistic, over-reliance on tools over process.
“But I do think that finance and IT organizations who
are suffering from Toolism must re-orient their thinking to not think
of a Tool first to solve their issues and understand the process and
what they are truly trying to enable first. At a minimum, they should
have at least have a healthy skepticism of Tools when they don’t have
the process understood. ” – Sponsored toolism – at least be skeptical
As we said in the beginning, a culture of
collaboration beats all the tools put together. But we’ve also pointed
out oftentimes that software itself can work to change the culture, and
this is especially powerful with tools of collaboration. The ultimate
point is that as architect Kavis has said, the tools are cheap or free,
and reasonably harmless to get started with. The key is to get started.
