Collaborating is challenging enough without having to work in an underperforming work environment. It’s time to step back and take a look at how your workspace is performing and make the necessary adjustments so that it is less obstacle for you and your team to overcome.

Back to blueKiwi. In last month’s update to our Enterprise 2.0 vendor evaluation research, we said “blueKiwi’s offering lies between the social platform Socialtext wishes to offer, and the ever-enticing notion of a modern replacement for email.” Done with explaining the acquisition rationale.

A social media platform like Handshake or a three-day process workshop are just tools to help build and maintain teams that work across organizational boundaries. These tools need to be complemented by new behaviors of the CEO and C-Suite, shared objectives and measures, and a governance structure and management processes to implement changes together and monitor and celebrate progress. These institutional changes are huge. Yet, as shown in the MITRE and patient journey examples, the best way to compete is to get everyone working together across boundaries to solve customer problems. Question: What experience have you had in building teamwork across organizational boundaries?

The title of his talk was “To Make Sense of Data, First Make Sense of People“. His central theme is that for a business, knowledge management is not purely knowledge management, and is becoming more & more associated with people management.  Change is getting messier, more human, and more social.  New tools and techniques are needed, and are becoming available for problem solving.

Lessons EA’s experience also makes clear the need for management to support mass collaboration—management not in the sense of controlling but in the spirit of working within the community to help members refine their purpose as well as to motivate participation, generate a flow of ideas, and facilitate decisions should the community become deadlocked. Among the key lessons: Support and enable individuals, but don't add to their workload. Empower teams to make recommendations and decisions. Provide an interactive, content-filled platform that will draw people in and keep them interested and engaged Think big: what about communities of customers, partners, IT staff, and the entire business ecosystem? But start small: kick off 4-5 pilots to get started Establish governance and a competency center, but allow communities sufficient autonomy to spawn, scale and thrive The platform and toolset are critical success factors Get help and find leverage to jumpstart the platform. At a very minimum, communities should get people talking and sharing!

Der Begriff Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), auch genannt Rechnergestützte Gruppenarbeit, beschreibt ein Forschungsgebiet der Psychologie, Soziologie, Informatik und weiteren Fachgebieten. Es beschäftigt sich damit, Gruppenarbeit zu erforschen und grundlegende Methoden zur ihrer Verbesserung zu finden, um dadurch technische Systeme zu entwickeln zu können, die Gruppenarbeit unterstützen. Eng damit verbunden und oft auch synonym gebraucht ist der Begriff Groupware, unter den die technischen Systeme fallen, die entworfen wurden, um die soziale Interaktion zwischen Benutzern zu erleichtern. Die Art der Interaktion kann dabei räumlich wie zeitlich verteilt sein.

Die zehn meistgewählten Begriffe waren: 1. Netzwerk 2. dezentrales Arbeiten 3. Agilität 4. Selbstorganisation 5. Coworking 6. Begeisterung 7. Social Media 8. Sinn 9. Selbstbestimmung 10. Freiheit   Diese Top Ten zeichnen ein positives, von Kollaboration getragenes Bild der Zukunft der Arbeit. Diese Auswahl lasse darauf schließen, so Patrick Scheuerer, "dass für die meisten Teilnehmer die Neue Arbeit vor allem mit der Art und Weise der Zusammenarbeit zu tun hat. Zwar sind mit Sinn und Kreativität auch Begriffe vertreten, welche durchaus stark mit den Arbeitsinhalten in Verbindung stehen. Der klare Fokus liegt jedoch auf dem Arbeitskontext: dezentrale Arbeit in Netzwerken, bevorzugt in Coworking Spaces und selbst organisiert."

Two interesting questions come to mind: How will the application and profile process evolve? We are all social animals. We also have a pretty solid understanding of what differentiates successful groups and successful teams. As freelancers and as potential co-workers, will we become more mindful about how we manage our associations? Grind is testing the hypothesis that there is value in filtering the freelancers who will have access to their space. Is this a leading indicator that the physical, social, psychological, and economic functions of the organization can be effectively decomposed and rearranged in new formats? It’s certainly time to reread Ronald Coase’s The Nature of the Firm. I might also take a look at Jay Galbraith’s Designing Organizations and Bob Keidel’s Seeing Organizational Patterns.

Big Ideas: Collaboration and creativity are big buzz words now but most businesses don’t really know how to collaborate or be creative. Collaborative efforts often produce mediocre results because ego gets in the way. A great team can produce amazing results, but finding those team members is not an easy task.

Love this article...for a number of reasons. Most teams I have been on have done exactly what the author describes; the objective is clearly defined while individual roles are fluid. Sometimes things went well; sometimes they didn't...and what I have noticed most is that whether or not "things went well" was largely dependent upon the team members' relationships with one another and respect for each other's expertise.

patterns as a way of making sense of group behaviour (and I'd say emergent phenomena galore)

"People should feel empowered by the idea of a science of team building, The idea that we can transmute the guess work of putting a team together into a rigorous methodology, and then continuously improve teams is exciting. Nothing will be more powerful, I believe, in eventually changing how organizations work."

.. zur Aneignung von #Wikis im JCSCW

"wurde der rote Faden in diesem Beitrag mehrmals umgeschrieben, bis (fast) alle Wünsche der Gutachter restlos erfüllt werden konnten. Zusammenfassend wurde dieser 40 Seiten lange Beitrag bis zum Erscheinen nämlich insgesamt fünf Mal intensiv begutachtet und ebenso oft durch uns überarbeitet (inklusive Verfassung von Gegendarstellungen als Antwort auf die Gutachten). Der Beitrag hat daher auch alle Akzeptanz-Stati von "major revisions requested", "conditionally accepted" und "minor revisions requested" erlebt und überlebt."

Business patterns of repeatable behaviour and consistent use of methodology or tools Technical patterns of business enablement through provision of platforms Integration patterns that exploit rampant connectivity, API and SDK model Agile patterns that embrace iteration and enable constant innovation Customer experience and UX patterns that redefine business models purely from the perspective of the customer/user Ecosystem patterns that both map and enable the complex systems of business without borders

Where Knowledge Management and Social Business diverge is the organic nature of Social Business. Knowledge Management was about the capture, structure, organization and availability of information from all sources. Social Business is about encouraging people to share what they know, to feel good about doing so, establish relationships with others in the organization which span the organization tree and genuinely do something extraordinary. This might sound like a utopian dream, but I believe there are legs to Social Business which all organizations can benefit from.

Einführung einer Social Business Lösung und der Ansatz von Hansen Im Rahmen der Einführung eines Social Intranet oder einer Kollaborationsplattform kann der Ansatz von Hansen an drei Stellen eine wichtige Rolle spielen:
1. Beseitigung der Search- und Transfer-Barriere
2. Change Management
3. Veränderungen messbar machen

Real time collaboration Like Google Wave, Rizzoma allows you to manage communications across distributed teams in real time. Everyone always has the latest version of the document, and everyone sees changes as they happen.

Alexander Stocker kommentiert und ich schließe mich an ;)

"Ich schließe mich grundsätzlich der Beziehungs-Sicht an. Dennoch sollten Technologien/Plattformen beide Arten von Beziehungen (stark & schwach) unterstützen.

Die E20-Diskussion um die Unterstützung schwacher Beziehungen ist grundsätzlich nicht neu. Sie resultiert (so vermute ich) auch daraus, dass starke Beziehungen ohnehin unterstützt werden, sowie aus der Sicht von Granovetter, dass es Sinn macht, schwache Beziehungen zu unterstützen. "

Theory #ftw :)

While IBM may not be the first to market, the least expensive nor the easiest to install/configure/manage, one thing they certainly do well is articulate the business value of social business. Every marketing message, product demo and customer case study is focused on why and how organizations need to transform themselves into a social business to remain competitive. My mantra for a while now has been to stop talking about "being social" and to instead focus on "getting work done" and IBM appears to be on that path.

some of the very shortcomings Google Wave started with.

Basic issues of connectivity – very few of our colleagues had Google Wave accounts.  We couldn’t trivially add them even if they were Gmail or Google Apps users already.

Basic issues of control – once someone was added to a Wave you couldn’t remove them.  And anyone could add someone.  That kind of permissiveness actually reduces sharing.

Minor issues of control – the Google Maps mashup was promising.  But I found you couldn’t control the location and sizing of the map presented – to show a specific region, at a specific zoom.  Pretty well defeats the purpose.

Walkaround is a variant of Wave, based on the Apache Wave code base, that runs on App Engine. Walkaround can import waves from wave.google.com to allow users to keep working with their data regardless of the future of wave.google.com. (The import feature is still experimental.)

Much of the walkaround code is not specific to Wave, but factored out as a separate, more general collaboration layer that manages shared live objects. These objects can be modified by multiple clients at the same time, with changes made by any client immediately broadcast to all others. The Wave application is built on top of this, but the live collaboration layer is flexible enough to support other applications. See the design overview.

Walkaround supports live concurrent rich-text editing, in-line replies, user avatars, wave gadgets, attachments, and we are working on integrating App Engine's full text search service. For now, it does not support Wave robots, federation, or private replies, but these features could be added.

What is the impact of coworking on larger corporations? How are they responding?

Mark Greiner: Businesses are recognizing the importance of choice to their employees. By providing options in how and where their employees work, they’re noticing increases in workplace productivity and morale. Corporations can’t ignore employees and their individual choices anymore. If they do, it will be at their expense.

We've always been keen on Google+ Hangouts, but a recent update provided some extras that make the experience even better. Now you can share your screen, collaborate in Google Docs, and even draw together in SketchUp. Additionally, the Hangouts API provides developers with the ability to integrate Hangouts into their own web apps. This could become a very interesting way to not only collaborate on work, but also share media and play games with other people across the web. More »

Just-launched webapp Trello is a simple yet powerful project management tool. We know, "project management" sounds kind of boring, but if you've ever tried using project management apps, Trello stands out as a tool that augments your collaboration without overwhelming you. More »

Mohamed Mansour hat ein neues, recht interessantes Projekt veröffentlicht: Hangout Pad for Google+. Es handelt sich dabei um eine Chrome Extension, die einen Editor in Hangouts zur Verfügung stellt. Sinn dieser Erweiterung ist es, gemeinsam Code zu schreiben und zu entwickeln, collaborate coding also

(This is part of HBR's Collaboration Insight Center.)

"I can't do that! I would receive thousands of ideas!" said Alberto Alessi, CEO of the Italian company that's famous for the design of its home products. "Well, isn't that exactly the point?" I replied. I was interviewing Alessi, together with Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano, about the potential of the new forms of collaborations enabled by the web.

Alessi is well known for his collaborations with a network of more than 200 external designers. For Alessi, the quality of collaborations is crucial. Quality means that he carefully identifies the most promising talented designers. Collaborations come first; ideas then follow. Indeed, building selective collaborations takes most of his time.

But now, with the help of the web, he could easily reach for a broader pool of ideas. The company could, for example, post on its website a competition for the design of a new corkscrew or teapot. And given the company's significant brand reputation, a copious flow of ideas would certainly pour in. Alberto Alessi, however, was not excited about this opportunity.

Yet nowadays many executives and scholars are interested in the potential offered by the web to leverage crowds of creative people (users, developers, designers). They look for ways to have more ideas. And the web, for example through innovation marketplaces such as Innocentive, makes it possible to rapidly build collaborations with a large number of contributors.

Who is right: Alessi, with his focus on the quality of selected collaborations, or the advocates of crowdsourcing, with their focus on the quantity of collaborations?

As Gary Pisano and I discussed in our HBR article "Which Kind of Collaboration Is Right for You?," my feeling is that the quality and quantity of collaborations serve different purposes.

A large quantity of collaborations is useful to create ideas. The larger the number of collaborations, the higher the number of opportunities that you can tap into and the higher the likelihood that a great idea may knock your door.

High-quality collaboration is useful when it comes to make sense of all these opportunities. Highly skillful collaborators can help you to better interpret this wealth of insights, to recognize the value of ideas that is not often visible at first, especially when it comes to radical change, and to identify a novel strategic direction.

If quantity is good for creating ideas, quality is good for setting a vision.

Some may think that quantity can be a substitute for quality. For example, the crowd could also help you to sort out the opportunities and select the best ideas. This, however, works when you need to solve a clearly defined problem (e.g. how to boil water faster in a tea kettle) and therefore it is easy to rank ideas. Or when you want to predict what the crowd will like (for example Threadless.com, a website selling T-shirts, leverages the web community to select the best designs.

However, when you need to set a new vision, reframe a problem, or search for a radical innovation, quantity will hardly help you find a direction. (Actually, as Alessi says, too many insights from too many collaborations may create even more confusion and noise.) Here is where carefully selected collaborators who have great talent can help you to identify the weak signals outside of the mainstream and make sense of a rich yet confused landscape of ideas.

Well, you would say, then we need both: a lot of good quality collaborations. It might be. But leadership is a matter of focus and priorities. And with our recent focus on crowdsourcing, our attention to building selective collaborations has withered. Yet, the more the web helps us develop collaborations in quantity and receive thousands of ideas, the more the real difference will come from the quality of closely selected collaborations that we will develop, and that will help us to make sense of this wealth of opportunities.

Roberto Verganti is the author of Design-Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean and has pioneered research on the intersection of strategy, design, and technology management. He is a professor of management of innovation at Politecnico di Milano and a member of the Design Leadership Board of the European Commission. He has served as an executive advisor, coach, and educator at a variety of firms, including Ferrari, Ducati, Whirlpool, Xerox, Samsung, Hewlett-Packard, Barilla, Nestlè, Intuit, and STMicroelectronics.

MIT Technology Review has been looking at collaboration approaches and tools during March, and has finally devoted an article to SharePoint.

"The collaboration tools discussed this month in Business Impact all have one thing in common. One way or another, they will run up against the market leader: Microsoft's SharePoint software, which is used by more than 100 million people around the world."

I feel the article gives a "populist" view on SharePoint, but doesn't get the underlying data correct.

For example:

1. In the paragraph above, it says that SharePoint is "used by more than 100 million people around the world." That's wrong. The actual claim by Bill Gates in March 2008 was that Microsoft has sold 100 million licenses, not that they have 100 million users. See Lies, Damned Lies, and SharePoint Licenses for more.

2. In paragraph two of the article, it says "customers like the fact that it works well with other widely used Microsoft products, such as Exchange e-mail and the Office software package." Based on my analysis of SharePoint 2007 and 2010, the reality is different. I would say that customers believe that SharePoint works well with Outlook, Exchange, and Office, but when they start using it, figure out that it actually doesn't. For example, Outlook/Exchange have calendaring capabilities, and so does SharePoint 2007 and 2010, but the integration is terrible. Download the free summary document of SharePoint 7 Pillars for more on this. There are multiple examples of where the integration is bad - eg, you can't even drag-and-drop an email from Outlook to a SharePoint Document Library that's been connected to Outlook, without buying a third-party product. That's just plain wrong.

3. Paragraph three of the article talks about SharePoint being customizable, and that organizations add third-party products. It's phrased in a way this is a good thing (and in some ways it is), but when Microsoft claims that SharePoint does particular things, and the reality comes up short, customers that have purchased SharePoint have little choice but to spend more to fix the shortcomings. For more, see The Cost of SharePoint = License Fee x9 (It's a Microsoft Figure) and What Does It Actually Mean to Offer a "Platform"? - Reconsidering the SharePoint Decision.

4. SharePoint has had a huge impact on the market - there is no denying that. But when you actually look at what it does technically, there are major areas of weakness.

Your point about SharePoint adoption is right on. But the way to get people to really adopt SharePoint is to allow them to use it without having to change the way their daily workflow, and today, business users spend their time in email, not next generation social software.

most security breaches are caused by people, and our best defense against them is knowledge and awareness. That said, I think it's just as possible that there will be increasing awareness of the cost implications of too many restrictions over sharing information, which is the point I'm making above.

SharePoint 2010 includes a lot that is new and improved on the collaboration side, and the people I speak with at organizations are very keen to get their hands on the new capabilities. As with any technology, features and functions are merely opportunities for doing work in a different way, so IT organizations and departments need to create strong engagement strategies for exploring fitness to task with their business department clients. Once opportunities for improving business activities have been identified, they then need to cultivate various user adoption strategies to ensure that the hoped-for-value translates into delivered-value. 

One of the benefits of using open source tools is that you can customize them to be used in ways that help your organization.

If you want to customize an open source tool, it may be simply a matter of handing it off to your IT department or hiring outside help. But what to do after you have a customized version of your software available?

The Open Source Ecosystem
The way that most proponents of open source tools hope you’ll move forward from that point is by sharing the customizations and changes your team has made and making them available for other users of that particular piece of software. Within your organization, there may be some arguments against doing just that. Some are legitimate: stripping out any information that would allow your competitors to learn about how you work from your customized software might be impractical, making it harder to protect your organization’s confidential information. Others may see the changes you made as proprietary, and that offering them for free is a waste of company resources.

Making those customizations available, however, can help you improve upon your chosen tool. The more users and developers are working on a given open source project, the less likely it is that development will stop — making it a useful investment for any organization relying on open source software.

The Core Developer Question
You could simply release your changes and customizations to the community that creates a particular tool, or you could take an active role in developing the tool in question, providing resources and help. There are certainly some benefits in taking a leadership role. You can help guide the development of your software, making it possible to implement key features that you may want. But taking a leadership role does take resources and time that you might otherwise dedicate elsewhere. It’s likely a question that only members of your organization can decide.

Of course, it’s very easy to get involved with most open source projects. The typical open source community can always use a few extra hands or a few extra dollars. If you make it clear that you’re interested in getting involved for the long haul, such communities will always find a way to bring you in and make use of whatever you can provide them with. It’s just a matter of deciding to get involved.

Does your organization actively support the open source projects it uses?

Image by Flickr user Ricardo Ferreira

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):



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Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?

If you have been a regular reader of this blog, you would know how, by now, and every so often, I get to talk and share further insights around one of my favourite Web sources for learning on a wide range of topics available out there at the moment. One that surely doesn’t leave people standing still; quite the opposite… Inspiring, provocative, insightful and enlightening are adjectives that come to mind when talking, of course, about TED Talks. Well, earlier on this week, I had the opportunity to watch one of those presentations that would surely fit in with that profile and that, if you haven’t watched it yet, would probably manage to wow you big time, just as much as it did for me. Indeed, I’m talking about Jason Fried‘s recent “Why work doesn’t happen at work“. Have you watched it already? No? If you think that work is something else than what you have been told all along, or have been doing all of this time sensing it just doesn’t feel right, this would be one Talk to watch! No doubt it won’t leave you indifferent!

It’s a rather short, but amazingly inspiring, presentation, that lasts for a little bit over 15 minutes, put together by Jason himself, where he comes to question, with some incredibly accurate and rather solid descriptions, the true nature of work and that one of what our traditional office environment has been all along and; how it, perhaps, needs to start thinking about changing some of the dynamics and key concepts behind the traditional physical office space.

Of course, while watching the video, I couldn’t help taking a few notes that resonated quite a lot with my overall experience as a knowledge worker who moved from a traditional office environment back in 2003 and who today is a full time mobile worker, spending most of the time working from his home office or travelling, and who wouldn’t have it any other way at this point in time. Yes, that’s right! Read further on and you will see what I mean … Watching Jason’s speech I just couldn’t help nod time and time again in agreement with everything he said about how we may need to start shaping up how we view work, and, most importantly, how we execute work, whether at a traditional physical space or remotely, because, apparently, the way we have been doing it all along hasn’t been the most effective so far. And he is right. Here is why …

Jason starts up his presentation identifying three different areas related to work, which I thought were rather interesting: Room (where does work happen for you? At the office, at home, travelling, at a customer’s, at the airport, you name it); Object (basically, what we produce) and, finally, Time (When does work happen? Early in the morning, throughout the day or in the evening, on the weekends, etc. depending on how productive we may feel at those times). With that intro he moves on to claim that at the traditional office, the physical space, we no longer get to do work, but, instead, we have work moments.

We seemed to have moved into work in chunks, being constantly exposed to interruptions that could come from various different places. Now, this is something that I could certainly relate to. Back when I used to work from a physical location it used to take about 5 hours to commute to work (Back and forth), so typically I would have to get up really early in the morning to arrive at around 9:30am at the office, and as soon as I would get in I would be getting exposed to those work moments. My boss would come in, asked me to go with him for a coffee (to catch up or just chit chat at the coffee corner, or water cooler, whatever term you would want to use…), spend a few minutes talking to him, then I would go to my desk and right as I am sitting down to start my work, colleagues would come around to talk, once again, or go for another coffee. You know, the usual stuff you do with work colleagues when you first see them at the office in the morning…

From there onwards one thing leads to the other and before you realise, it’s lunch time. My lunch time. So by the time I could go and sit down at my desk to start doing my work it would be after 1pm in the afternoon; then meetings and conference calls would kick in and before you knew it off it goes your entire work day dedicated to stuff you probably could have done without just that day. But then you go on and keep working, before you go back home, because there are a number of tasks that need to be finished and you know you can’t leave them behind, just like that. So you end up doing a whole bunch of extra hours, just because of those interruptions giving you back only a few work moments. Does that situation ring a bell? I bet it does, specially, if you are one of those knowledge workers who still gets to go the traditional office. So here is a question for you… when does work happen for you in that scenario?

Right, under that premise, Jason gets to share some rather interesting thoughts about how we have moved into a corporate environment, for all of us, where we seem to consistently lack long term periods of hard thinking. We just don’t have time for them anymore, because of those interruptions! Eventually, resulting in knowledge workers choosing alternative methods to carry out their work; whether they do it while at home, or later on in the office, once things quiet down a bit, or in a plane, in the car, at an airport, etc. etc. In these new environments, it looks like the distractions are minimum; there are still some of them out there, but they are not the same as in your traditional office. How many times have you called the office yourself to tell your boss you are going to be at home for the whole morning, so that you can concentrate on a rather hard and tough task you need to accomplish soonish? I bet more than once!

So why do we keep insisting then on commuting to the office, when we all know that we are not the most productive during that time, specially with those interruptions kicking in time and time again? Why do we keep insisting on measuring knowledge workers’ performance by their sheer physical presence, as opposed to the results delivered on tasks accomplished? Why do we keep on distrusting our knowledge workforce to do their job properly, when we know that in the first place we have hired professionals who know they need to be just that: professional? When are we going to start trusting them to be more responsible for what they do on a day to day basis? Isn’t it about time we shift gears, change our corporate chips and inspire an open, collaborative work environment where knowledge workers take more control, AND responsibility, for what they do … and let them do their thing?

That’s exactly the premise that Jason comes to question in his presentation. In fact, he goes even further! He comes to compare sleep and work as both being pretty much the same; in order to get a good night sleep you would rather prefer not to have any interruptions, because it will disrupt the sleeping phases you go through and you wouldn’t get the rest you deserve after a hard working day. Well, the same thing happens with work; in order for you to do a proper job about something, in order to get work done, it would work best if you wouldn’t have any interruptions. Yet, that doesn’t seem to be happening very often, to the point where he keeps questioning how can we expect people to work at the office effectively, if they keep getting interrupted time and time again? Quite an eye opener, don’t you think?

Well, it gets better, because, at this stage, it is when he turns things upside down a bit, stirring the pot some more, becoming a bit more provocative in the end, detailing what may well be some of the most typical examples at the office and how some of the main real distractions employees are exposed to, according to their managers, are social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc. going to the extreme of blocking them not allowing their employees to access them freely, when in reality it shouldn’t have to be like that! His notion of these social tools as our modern smoke breaks is terrific and rather descriptive of what we used to have back then when we used to hang out at the coffee corner, or water cooler, having a short break talking to colleagues before getting back to work. Things seem to have changed very little, don’t you think? We have just been moving away from that physical water cooler to a virtual one: The Social Web.

What’s interesting though from his presentation is to watch him talk about what he feels are the real problems; what Jason calls M&Ms (No, nothing to do with chocolate! hehe); what he refers to as “Managers and Meetings“. Apparently, manager’s job is that one of interrupting people at the wrong time; also perhaps calling up meetings when they shouldn’t. All of these are toxic, terrible, poisonous events managers do, because hardly any knowledge worker would eventually do that. According to him, and it is not the first time I have seen / read about it, meetings are very expensive to the business provoking those very same interruptions!

This is when it gets really fascinating in the presentation itself, because he comes up forward proposing some solutions as to how we could help our businesses reduce a large chunk of those meetings, and interruptions, happening while at work so that we can continue having a go at it and do what we need to do: work. He comes to propose that instead of scheduling a meeting people could start making heavier use of both traditional and emerging collaborative, knowledge sharing and social software tools to get the job done. Now this is something that some folks may consider silly, yet, in my own experience, it’s tremendously powerful and relatively easy to achieve.

There was a time in my recent past where what Jason described was pretty much my day to day workload; long days of conference calls a[…]

Ich glaube, daß es weiter einen Posteingang braucht. Dieser Posteingang sieht aber ganz anders aus als der, den wir heute kennen. In dem Posteingang von Morgen laufen alle Informations- und Aktivitätenströme zusammen, die für den jeweiligen Anwender relevant sind. In der Zukunft werden E-Mails mit  Aktivitätenströme aus SAP oder anderen Tools in zusammengeführt in einem universellen Posteingang, dem Posteingang der Zukunft und der Zukunft von E-Mail. Statt von einem Posteingang zum nächsten zu springen, von E-Mail zu SAP zu BPM Tools und relevanten News, werden die Nachrichten und Aufgaben nicht nur an einer Stelle zusammengeführt. Sie werden dort auch direkt bearbeitet.

That is what the open source movement is about: using the power of collaboration to accelerate innovation.

We tend to have this reflex: better collaboration = more connectivity. The problem with such approach is that collaboration requires people’s time and drawing a line between every two nodes of a unit’s social graph would cost more than the value it delivers. So the aim would be increasing collaboration at points that would create value and decreasing connectivity where it causes more harm than good -> appropriate connectivity, focused collaboration.

The discussion turns interesting when he touches on “directed collaboration” and “structured activities”.  Here I believe he is struggling with the same thing that the authors of “Mastering the Unpredictable” did.  Many people see collaboration in the office place as being a pre-defined process, and this is even commonly called a “structured process”.  Yet, as I have discussed many times here, much of the most interesting and valuable work is not predictable or predefined, but rather “emergent” as proposed in adaptive case management.

We are a team of IBMers in Ghana and Germany, who are working on the Business Blue Project “Smarter Global Collaboration“. Our main goal is to facilitate transnational collaboration between small and medium sized companies around the world, particularly between mature and emerging markets. Apart from our own experience as an international, virtually collaborating team, we will like to share this platform with you to share ideas and information.

 Most concepts of collaboration are unfortunately very document and workspace centric. We tend to think of communication as something divorced from "joint work". We tend to think of communication as "not collaboration" even though communication is what often enables the cognitive context and situational awareness necessary for all participants to work jointly together over time and space. Secondly, there has been a tremendous focus on "process" lately in E2.0 circles.

Facebook Groups will generate demand for enterprise social networking solutions tied to mission-critical business processes. That's not what Facebook is designed to do. But employees are increasingly looking down on the solutions that IT departments provide if these solutions don't have the ease of use and functionality of publicly available services that are used do easily outside of work. This places more responsibility on employees to control their use of external services; organizations not accustomed to giving employees such responsibility are going to have a very hard time adjusting.

Collaboration is something all members of boards and management teams should emphasize and practice as part of their daily work with the CEO setting the best example. Furthermore, depending on the type of organisation many employees have lots of possibilities these days to link. It is a responsability which should not be focussed on one person only, but as widely spread as possible on every level in the organisation.

We saw some great Twitter submissions to the Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara Launch Pad contest. Thanks to all that entered!

The Jury have voted and the verdict is in. Here are the 8 semi finalists that move on to the Video Round:

ESRI
FlowChart.com LLC
Itensil
Mainsoft
Meetzi
nGenera
Nimble
ThoughtFarmer

If you are a semi finalist, please email me: paige at techweb dot com - so I can supply you with directions on how how to upload your 3 minute video to YouTube. More info on timelines and key dates can be found here.

Congrats to all our semi finalists! Looking forward to seeing the videos you cook up.

Community, collaboration, and meritocracy are a few of the principles of the open source way highlighted in the most recent McKinsey Quarterly report, “Clouds, big data, and smart assets: Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch.”

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What is "collaboration"? It's a frequently asked question. In my masterclasses, I start with the short hand, to "co-labour" on one slide, and then expand it to "Collaboration means people working with other people towards a common outcome." Note that there is no mention of technology in the definition.

But, the problem with my definition above is that it's extremely broad. It covers just about anything we do at work with other people!

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In summary:
- "Collaboration" is a special case situation where people work together in a particular way towards a common outcome.
- In common usage, "collaboration" is a nearly meaningless term, because it defines too wide a scope of people "working together". It's a buzzword and a trendy term.