Here comes a list of statement you might (or not) avoid to say when you want to convince colleagues or clients for such changes. Please share more as I am sure you have plenty.

This is for all of you who share the daily burden of convincing people about the value of open knowledge sharing through the Internet for the benefit of all. The outdated hierarchies and top down work styles restrict free flowing ideas and creative work in self-responsible teams, so what can you do?

Here comes a list of statements you might (or might not!) avoid when you want to convince colleagues or clients to make such changes. Please share more as I am sure you have plenty.

• Yes sure we can measure the results of online knowledge sharing and prove value for money for each invested penny.
• Tell the IT people that there are stuck in the 80′s, far from reality and will soon be obsolete.
• We will not implement a website. It will be a mashup consisting of social networks, blogs, wikis, widgets, tagging, maps and much more.
• Let us move the informal conversation online. We will have real-time interaction from all employees tweeting 9-5.
• Forget about email. It is oudated and we will share openly information across departments and hierarchies.
• Inside – outside does not matter anymore, so re-think your Intranet and open it.
• Let’s give up the documentation management system and let all employees tag files how they think best.
• Your employees will have full control of the website themselves and we can turn off the workflow function.
• Forgot about desktop solutions. Outsource your applications to external providers.
• We should do it in the wiki fashion – everybody will add their knowledge and expertise across your organization web.
• Have you heard of Firefox and Skype? They are dangerous tools luckily blocked by your firewall.

Your thoughts?

No related posts.

Three years ago I started experimenting for the first time with web2.0 at my organization (GTZ). In Egypt, we implemented a blog to link different projects of GTZ. Since then, I have been taking part in several initiatives and joined many discussions with the IT, communication, knowledge management and other departments. I have learnt a lot about the complexity of organizations and the opportunities and obstacles to engage in social media.

Therefore, I decided to share the different experiences and challenges we have encountered and try to identify success factors, hoping this can help others who are also dealing with social media at an organization and encouraging them to implement it. I will write about this in a series of blog-posts over the coming months.

It is not the tools

To begin with, being a bit critical, I think there is a risk to believe just tools such as wikis or blogs can achieve something that was not there before. Because it touches quickly the core of an organization, namely its culture. If the organizational setting is based upon strict hierarchy, information silos and a very formalistic approach, then clearly open sharing and a horizontal communication is difficult to be implemented, with or without web2.0. Some would argue that new forums for this kind of transparency and openness can have an impact on the organizational culture, though.

What is the character of your organization?

Identify the right scenarios!

However, before implementing web2.0 tools in an organization, it is very important to analyze the already existing instruments, the organization communication behaviours, the degree of openness and trust of knowledge sharing, and the social setting. Most important web2.0 is best used where the quickest win is possible particular at the beginning.

So what are the usual scenarios where employees exchange knowledge?

• Is it mainly in the cafeteria, on the telephone or mainly through email?
• Does the organization rely on a dense meeting culture and direct contact?
• How many different tools for communication already exist, other than telephone, meetings, emails, etc.?
• So far, how have interactive web based applications worked? What went well and what wrong?

This list could be easily extended, please write me if you have some other points.

To find the right tools for the existing work scenarios

The challenge is that there are not only many different tools for online communication, but also they can be used so differently. The trick is to identify a deficit in a typical scenario of work context and find the right tool for it. Particularly, in the beginning, it is very helpful
to target a need and gain a quick win.

For instance, a wiki can be used for very different purposes and are best adapted to the organizational need.

• Use it to write the protocol each week and to have a central place to follow up tasks. It can be written during the meeting and everybody can add it instantly or edit it later on.
  Advantage: It is a small start, implemented in a existing process and you can learn on the fly.
  Disadvantage: Only a small area of work or project management.
• A glossary for a department to collect precise information for standard processes.
  Advantage: The benefit of sharing can be shown quickly when a critical mass of employees contribute. Writing together what already exists.
  Disadvantage: Needs support from the whole department. cannot easily be established if staff does not want to share and it needs trainingfor each one who is involved.
• To organize the next company party or trip and use it for logistics.
  Advantage: For a temporary time and involves a small team. Shows transparency of the planning process to other colleagues.
  Disadvantage: Needs dedicated people and proper gardening of the wiki structure. Wikis can become easily confusing in larger projects (logistics).

These are, of course, only a few examples, but they shall show the variety of different implementation options. To analyze first what are normal work scenarios and then adapt a tool to it, it is therefore a key success factor.

This is a blog post series about my experiences on web2.0 in an organization, consisting of at least 26 different blog posts highlighting potentials and challenges and focusing on success factors. Please feel free to comment, contact me for further information and/or let me know which other topics within this context you would be interested on.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Related posts:

1. Organization 2.0 – what you should avoid saying This is for all of you, who share the daily...

Last week, I was at the re-publica.de conference. Often, the most interesting aspect of conferences are the side talks with other visitors. And this one was not the exception. I had a great chat with Martin Koser, an enterprise2.0 expert (with excellent bookmarks) and Andreas Gohr, the head developer of the interesting DokuWiki. We discussed in length the barriers and potentials to start implementing social software in organizations and once again agreed on the importance of the organizational culture. But the technical side is also quite complex and, for example, wikis can be implemented in various ways.

So far, I am amazed about the collaboration potential of wikis, but also disappointed about their usability. Until this discussion, I was kind of convinced that the user shall be in the focus. Participation should be as easy as possible, so no technical barrier hinders users to add or edit content. But Martin and Andreas surprised me at one point by saying that WYSIWYG are not necessarily an advantage. I shared my surprise on twitter, which brought up these reactions, and hence, I decided to write a blog post about it:

So far, I argued for WYSIWYG editors for these reasons:

• There are different little barriers one has to bear before one can start editing a wiki page. Most people are used to Word, and WYSIWYG editors are familiar in this regard. Cryptic code might be confusing and needs some experience.
• WYSIWYG give guidance and integrate nicely other media such as images or table.
• A wiki is not seldom confusing because of its missing hierarchy. WYSIWYG editors ease to set up new pages or link to existing ones.
• Many wikis still lack user orientation and are rather confusing (e.g. no hierarchical menu or insufficient linking). The less a user has to think or adapt, the better. Content should matter.

So here it is a list of arguments against WYSIWYG editors. Martin Koser also wrote another excellent post about it.

• Too much function distracts from content. It is the same problem with Word. Hours spent on elaborating sophisticated tables instead on concentrating on the content.
• Code editors limit users and let them focus on structured content — what is useful and which structure (e.g. header and bullet point lists) is best for the reader? If used properly, those texts have more clarity.
• WYSIWYG invite to paste all content completely from word, which is not necessarily conducive for collaboration.
• Basically, it is a short code list to learn, and then you can write faster and it is more simply to edit codes.
• No doubt the code created by WYSIWYG is often a mess and does not separate content and formatting.

Does that convince you?
The discussion, once again, showed me how complex the implementation of social software can be, or how easy if you just let the people use it. The question of WYSIWYG editor might be trivial, but in contrary, the lack of those editors are a key argument to decline social software, as Martin pointed out.

No related posts.

In older days, new software and applications came to an organization via the IT department. Nowadays, it is easier for social software to reach organizations in different ways because no firewall can stop it. To keep social software and its potential for knowledge sharing behind the firewall it is a contradiction.

Social software arrives in an organization in many different ways. Traditionally, it used to be installed software, where the desktop was — or still is — protected to prevent any misuse. As the web becomes a platform, applications are more and more web based. For example, a whole office suite can be accessed online. Calendars, project management and to-do lists are also offered for free. And of course blogs, wikis and social networks are just one click away. Clearly this changes the role of the IT department.

Dennis D. McDonald elaborates the different adoption models social media. He sees four different models in which social media and social networking are taken up by organizations:

• Top down
  In the “top down” model organization’s leaders implement and lead the adoption of tools and techniques such as blogs, wikis, social networking systems, shared bookmarks, and podcasting.
• Bottom up
  In the “bottom up” model the workers start blogging, using wikis and social networking systems to advance their jobs.
• Inside out
  This is a variation of “bottom up,” only this time the tools are adopted internally by the organization and their usage spills over into external markets, members, or customers of the organization.
• Outside in
  In this model the adoption of social media and social networking by the marketplace progresses to a point where the organization can no longer ignore it, especially if usage by competitors starts to become public.

But why is it interesting to know how it happens?

1. It says a lot about the organizational culture.
2. It lets you connect it better to existing web solutions.
3. Too many different social software not connected nor taken with enough care will lead to another information overload and frustration.
4. Social media needs its audience and that can flourish itself in an organizational environment as long as people are aware of it.

Top down

It has its advantages because tools are available right in the organization and resources are given to promote them. However, there are not necessarily adopted as easily because it does not prove an added value per se. Especially, focusing purely on a tool can become easily a dead end. More important to motivate engagement in the dialogue in order to experiment is a key, and that is much easier with the support of the management. However, the top down approach can only be a trigger or role model, but success evolves through a horizontal community.

Bottom up

It is the most obvious way and what is happening in many cases. Facebook is, for example, a mixture of private and professional contacts. But can a social network be build informally through a web in an organization? Employees can easily experiment with blogs out in a secure place for free. The time until a specific software is on every desktop can take ages. In contrast, web tools are a click away and they are getting better everyday. This “guerilla method” has also its disadvantages that the more people there are, the more different tools are used. Organizational knowledge is not linked and dispersed over the net. It is also questionable whether it reaches a lot of colleagues.

Inside out
This is, however, an great attempt for an open network, where the organization can benefit best from internal and external knowledge. Few companies or organizations are doing this as far as I know. But until today the potential is not used if you look at social network, which marginal or not, are all grasped by an Intranet. I can think of Sun Microsystems. This approach blurs the boundaries, but leads to improved learning and innovation. That is what the book “Wikinomics” is all about. The resistance, especially from the management to it, is surely the strongest for many different reasons. This approach leads, however, to interesting debates about whether information has to be confidential and what should be open for sharing.

Outside in
This is happening still very rarely. Surely blogs and wikis are tested in many organizations. However the outside pressure on organizations is in my opinion still low, because not enough organizations have proven the success of advantage of social software. However Larry Huston gave an interesting interview Innovation Networks: Looking for Ideas Outside the Company.

I don’t believe we’re at a tipping point yet, but I think, in the future, the companies that identify those assets outside and begin to build relationships with them have a real shot at building a competitive advantage and preferential relationships.

Often, employees have to find their own way to get all sort of information out from the web. A comprehensive feed subscription would be needed to deliver employees with good and relevant information available.

How does web2.0 arrive in your organization? What are the obstacles before it flourishes? Can you see the different ways it happens? Which key success factors are embraced by an organization and its members?

Related posts:

1. Organization 2.0 – what you should avoid saying This is for all of you, who share the daily...

From a knowledge management perspective Intranets are vital but so far inefficient. On one side, it is the only place where organizational information can be decentralized access 24/7. On the other side, the web behind the firewall is mostly top-down driven and hierarchical structured. The results are that only a tiny little fraction of social networking potential is possible and that most Intranets literally hinder possibilities to share knowledge.

Failure of Intranet
Well designed and managed Intranets cover most topics from an organization or company. However, if you look at the potential of social networking, knowledge sharing and learning, the internal web is in most cases failing terribly. Intranets represent top-down communication and no personal knowledge is offered, except for some neat yellow pages. Some companies already replaced their content management system with a wiki, where employees change things as they know better. Instead, the norm is content management system and useless work flows. So, person A writes a text, person B approves it, and person C publishes it. There is a higher chance to call some colleagues to get better information than finding it in the internal web. Thus, only a tiny fraction of what is really happening in an organization is offered. One consequence is that learning in an organization happens only outside the web.

The clash of cultures
There is a clash of culture between the Intranet sympathizers and those for open horizontal knowledge sharing. At the one end, there is the belief that information needs to be authoritatively managed and has to be standardized. Intranets often represent the wish of all relevant knowledge could be codified. At the other end, there is the belief that IT knowledge management solutions have to change, and emphasis should be on social networking. The read-write or collaborative web finally offers to the employees to use what fits best their needs. This, of course, changes the picture of what is happening in an organization. Intranets are planed mostly by small teams and too little focused is on the real needs of employees. Why do not let employees create their internal web then?

It will come anyway
I think the classical Intranet — a neat little homepage with different topics, a representation of each department, some yellow pages and maybe a document management system — is history in a few years. Having the three click blog installation, easy collaboration through wikis and web based office products, and be able to connect in own networks will completely burr the lines between the Intranet and Internet. For so many work related tasks, tools are already freely available in the internet and employees will sooner or later take use of that on a massive scale. It will come anyway and it surely might be a bit chaotic to some extent. But, which meeting is consistent, purely orientated on knowledge sharing and learning in your organization? Furthermore, it is a big chance in an organizational setting because it can deepen already existing work relations in an even more trusted environment.

Downsides

• Obviously, one danger is that all information, conversation and ideas are spread over the internet. How can you find out about what your colleague is doing? The internal search engines does not grasp it and again the possible transparency and exchange is lost because of too many tools in too many places.
• In the beginning it does need a learning phase of how to use each tool best. The key is to bring the right mixture of tools together, which fits best to the organizational culture.
• A holistic approach is important, otherwise social software leads to an information overload. Therefore filters, feeds and consistency are decisive.
• Social software depends heavily on its employee’s engagement, contrary to conventional Intranets. If there is no motivation, then better stick to the old Intranet.
• Web knowledge sharing can be very efficient, but it does not replace direct face to face communication.

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1. Organization 2.0 – what you should avoid saying This is for all of you, who share the daily...

I have already written about 10 challenges for web2.0 in an organization, but this time I would like to highlight two decisive factors: Culture and a new paradigm of knowledge sharing. Furthermore, this post elaborates the differences between web2.0 in private life vs. in an organizational setting.

1. Culture is a key factor. Blogs and wikis change communication drastically to a horizontal level and make it transparent. Workflows are given up. Openness is a key to accept ideas and ongoing changes. If employees do not dare to share, the greatest tools will end up on failure. In a way, hierarchy and power driven communication are poison for such a participative approach.
2. Embrace the new paradigm for knowledge sharing. The collaborative web stands in contrast to many efforts trying to codify and categorize information. Making web2.0 work in an organization requires to accept knowledge in its different dimensions. Information cannot be own by only one party. Information can be sorted, interpreted and exchanged in multiple ways. Knowledge and learning evolves in a network.

To clarify the second point, I referred to David Snowden, who has mentioned this nice quote in a recent podcast. Elsua has some nice posts about the podcast.

Web2.0 is too unstructured to fit into an organizational setting, which heavily relies on codified and categorized knowledge. When you move to on a free flow of ideas what web2.0 about – then this kind of contradicts to processes and hierarchies of an organization.

All of this is much more difficult than expected in a conventionally run company or organization. In private life, this is so much easier to accept the collaborative web and to play around with. No surprise web2.0 is driven mainly by individuals, and organizations are slow followers.

A nice comparison between enterprise2.0 and web2.0, on the ‘Dif-fer-en-ti-ate blog,’ highlights the differences and the likely challenges:

web2.0 vs. enterprise2.0

• Organisational structure: Flat vs Hierarchical–flat organisational structures encourage collaboration while hierarchical ones hinder.
• Attitude: Sharing vs Hoarding–in your private life you share information freely without expectation of recompense, while at work, all people ask is, ‘what is in it for me?’.
• Visibility: Anonymity vs Recognition–in Web2.0 you are one of the herd; the majority of users can assume that there is anonymity in a crowd. At work people seek recognition for their contribution as career progression can depend on it.
• Society: Public vs Private–in Web2.0 you are able to control the information you share as well as free to create alternative persona’s, masks, behind which you can hide. In Enterprise2.0 there is no anonymity, everything you say and do online can be traced back to you.

No related posts.

Leila Summa has given a great presentation called “Wanted: Employee2.0 – when technologies wait for their users.” She presented it in German but here I have translate some parts. (Complete presentation). It underlines again how fast this new forms of communication and opportunities evolve, how much faster organizations need to react, and how profound the culture impact will be sooner or later.

I found especially these two slides intriguing because they describe the future development in work life, the visions of many enthusiastic people about cultural changes of the new web, and the personal effect on the employee. The first slide accurately describes the old way of work life for employee1.0. Translation starting from the top center then clockwise:

(1) material values, (2) life-time position, (3) security, (4) stability & continuity, (5) personal contacts with a friend, (6) employee as a cost factor, (7) top-down – one way communication, (8) internal communications, (9) belief in hierarchy, (10) days/hours, (11) values of liability and acceptance.

The second slide describes wonderfully how the present work life 2.0 hits the employee. Translation clockwise: (1) immaterial values, (2) manager for time/freelancing, insecurity, (3) flexibility & change, social contacts with many friends, (4) employee as a knowledge source, (5) bottom down – two way communication, (6) internal relations, (7) social network, (8) minutes/seconds, (9) values of self fulfillment.

These slides show the changes of work life and to which large extent this will be shaped by the web. It certainly shows some downsides as instant communications. Not without surprise I see more in newspapers articles with titles such as “in the future anonymity is a luxury” or “the happiness of being unattainable.” What I miss on the slides is the culture of openness, sharing and the free flow of ideas in the participatory web.

(via PR Blogger)

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Last Tuesday I took part on a discussion round in Düsseldorf, Germany. It was about the changing of the communication of enterprises due to web2.0. Reflecting the evening, I find it quite interesting what it might have meant in terms of the new web and its potential users in Germany. To put ahead, I share the opinion that web2.0 has reached Germany quite late – especially if you take a look at the enterprise sector. This event was mainly directed towards external communication or public relation experts, and not so focused on knowledge sharing approaches. Next to me sat Thomas Knüwer, a journalist from the the German Handelsblatt and Marc Pohlmann, who eagerly talked about direct one to one marketing and Wieland Stützel from Frankfurt airport.

Less people, than originally registered, showed up — I even had my doubts the visitors were interested in knowledge sharing. My basic statement was that German companies underestimate the potential of web2.0 even though web2.0 offers new incentives for knowledge sharing, opens new ways of participation and questions hierarchies. The technology is secondary; the communication and exchange sets the dynamic.

Maybe it was the rain, maybe they had already heard enough of web2.0, or they simply did not find it interesting enough. As I am following closely a lot of reportages in the old media, I think not so much has been reported, and when so, it is often reduced to the usual sites (wikipedia, youtube). It was interesting to see and hear that for many communication experts, knowledge sharing is of minor interest.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, most people wanted to get a guideline or solution: How can I influence this community? How can I get my message to the client? And lastly, how to make money with it?

But on the podium were four people arguing in favour of the authentic conversation about the web and how deeply it will change communications. Sadly, that seemed to bored the public relation audience. So, is it the companies or the employees who are not ready for web2.0? Can top-down internal and external communication specialists really have any benefit from it? Right then I had my doubts. But again, It showed me how far the participatory web is from mainstream or normal life organizations. It also showed me that there is a big skepticism about “just another web tool”. It is definitely still too far away from everyday practice within organizations.

Not surprisingly, first remarks from the audience were how to apply it and what will it change? My points about open source collaboration and open networking of organizations did not seem to make them curious. However I found the following quotes nice:

• Marc Pohlmann: “This web shift is not about coverage, it is about one’s niche audience and about having a conversation with it.”
• Thomas Knüwer: “There is not more trash in the Internet it is just so much easier to find it.”
• Wieland Stützel: “Nowadays structured organizations are so much in an internal competition between departments – how shall they possible work together and collaborate and go outside.”

I found it all quite interesting, but it did not seem to engage the audience. I guess we did not achieve the conversation. However, this was not my first time in this kind of events, and still, I am often struck about people’s desire for a road-map of how to deal with it and to influence it, rather than just say ‘that sounds interesting let’s check it out and experiment with it.’

No related posts.

Here in Germany, Web2.0 is in everybody’s mouth. Newspapers have been reporting about it lately, and some things are around the buzz word–blogs, wikis, social networks, wikipedia, facebook or youtube, get more and more attention. Whereas in the first wave most people wondered where and when will the next cool start-up spring up. The debate went on whether blogs are a threat to media or not. The wikipedia phenomenon brought finally the knowledge and collaboration dimension of web2.0 to the spotlight.

Ironically, in my opinion, the IT departments–responsible still–have often not taken the participative web as a top priority. And I wonder whether this is different elsewhere. By the way, a similar phenomenon is seen in the knowledge management arena. In relevant magazines, web2.0 and its potential for knowledge sharing and learning has hit the headlines this Summer. However, not many blogs are even around (Please notify me if you know some). One exception is Martin Röll, who wrote very early, albeit he stopped his blog, about knowledge sharing through blogs. Three other nice blogs are zungu.net, frogpond.de and Wissensmanagement2.0.

Going back to the topic, I wonder why many IT-specialists do not show a wider interest in web2.0 and share some enthusiasm. Here are some assumptions:

• IT-experts know by own experience that web2.0 is just another approach, and doubt the hype around it.
• IT-experts are bored of the triviality of this kind of software such as blogs and wikis.
• IT-departments completely underestimate the effects for web2.0 software.
• Web2.0 is seen secondary as technological and it is much more about culture, communication and commitment (3C)

“Like it or not, Web 2.0 is coming,” says Lisa Hoover in the context of enterprise2.0, and this different tools will be used in organizations. Euan agrees by stating: The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0? DO NOTHING. It strikes me to see how many people individually already use web2.0 tools such as blogs or wikis, or they arrange meetings with doodle, use their own desktop sharing and collaborate over google docs. And this all goes easily around the firewall because it is all browser-based. Nevertheless, some obstacles remain as Bev Trayner describes in her blog post Web2.0 is a long way from people at work.

I think it is important to grasp the potential of collaboration and to prove it can be a reduction of information overload and leverage new forms of collaboration. However, from a knowledge management perspective, it is also critical because of how can we share information, when it is distributed over the web. How can it be linked and searched from the intranet? Nevertheless, I am still puzzled about the reluctance towards web2.0 even though it can become a decisive and comparative advantage, being it internally for communication or externally to flourish cooperation.

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1. A shift in information sharing: Faster, more intensive and direct Something has changed. Information sharing isn’t what it used to...

It is not always easy to argue in favour of web2.0 tools when you are faced with these arguments:

• More information? My mailbox already drives me nuts!
• The content written by some people is often so irrelevant and just for entertainment.
• I spent already so much time online and now I shall even invest more time on these social networks, wikis etc.
• I can find my stuff in google. Why shall I tag, blog or share bookmarks?
• Didn’t we try this online interaction before and it failed? Look at forums and why they never worked.
• IT solutions often fail. Look at all these outdated databases where you cannot find what you need.

I already wrote some posts about communication and knowledge sharing through web2.0 in an organization. To me, it seems worthwhile to experiment with it, especially because it empowers each member of an organization. But being convinced and enthusiastic is not enough to help people overcome their skepticism about just another set of IT tools.
So I tried to summarize ten arguments, which help me often persuade colleagues and friends to give web2.0 a try.

1. Overview: Look at folder structure on your computer. Did it work to store your documents in the right folder and to find them quickly later on? How are the search results of your intranet? Imagine you could criss-cross through tag clouds of topics from your organization, with a few clicks you would find your niche topic. It is not magic. Social bookmarking tools, such as delicious, show it works. It does not use folders. Instead it relies on tags.
2. Transparency: In emails and classical Intranet, dominated environment information is in-transparent. It goes vertical or horizontal and hides all the valuable information–interesting for others–in mailboxes of individuals.
3. Relevance: Emails reach you whether you want them or not, and a lot of their content has no relevance to your work. With RSS feeds, you subscribe to what is relevant to your work or what deals about your topic. With your blog, you gather your own community of interest around you and share practice.
4. Connectedness: Imagine address books or yellow pages would not be the only source to find competence. You could surf different wikis, blogs and bookmark pages, and see behind every page your colleagues discussions or people with similar links. All these conversations make you aware of who are the colleagues sharing your interest or problem.
5. Openness: Using the read/write web in organizations means that you can interact at any point –being it in a wiki project page or a colleague’s blog post– and help to link the right people and the right topics together. For example, a profile page with a tag cloud of posts and links shows each person’s interests in detail.
6. Enrichment: Do you struggle over formal documents written in a boring way, leaving out the experiences and opinions. To codify tacit knowledge is a difficult task anyway. Blogs can become storytelling tools amplifying hundreds of learning experiences from daily practice of teams and colleagues.
7. Easiness: The best part of most of the web2.0 tools is their easy handling. These tools are consequently made for people and have been many times tested to make them better. The beta mode of many applications shows their openness to approach improvement. In contrast, to complicated content management systems, wikis and blogs do not require training.
8. Technology: A great thing about many web2.0 tools is their often easy technology. You do not have to ask for every second step to the IT department. It is not a sophisticated database with a complicated interface that fails in giving you the right information. Web2.0 means that staff can create and mix tools and media themselves. Blogs can be set up in minutes, interdependencies are created through links and not failing search robots.
9. Network: Did you ever struggle while navigating through a website? No surprise because it shows only a one dimensional perspective on the organizational knowledge. When colleagues frequently bookmark what interest them in an organizational web and share this with others, then, they weave their own web. This, not only links the real knowledge domains important for an organization; it also creates a social network.
10. Contribution: Such a web relies on the contribution of its members. It, therefore, highlights and re-numerates the most active contributors, who are willing to share knowledge and like to connect people to learn from each other.

And last but not least, web2.0 has of course obstacles because interaction often remains online. But how great can it work when you find an interesting blog post from a colleague and then ask him to have lunch next week.

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2. A shift in information sharing: Faster, more intensive and direct Something has changed. Information sharing isn’t what it used to...

Dana Gardner’s article “RSS feeds begin to bleed into enterprise applications” talks about mashups of RSS feeds or “feed bleeds,” how he calls them. Although his article is quite technological, it still has interesting insights and goes in the same direction as my recent post about the hidden potential of RSS feeds.

What’s newly powerful is that nearly any kind of content can be driven through these feeds — from documents, spreadsheets, and data to video, blogs, podcasts and online HTML instruction manuals.

In another point, he argues that feed mashups can be easily remixed or fine-tuned, or they can be combined to powerful mashups with all kinds of different sources such as location, language, etc. Basically, as in the old way, you will not have a database that is accessed through a search engine. Now, instead, you will have various sources of information from inside and outside an organization, which you can combine as needed. The potential mashups are unlimited.

First example:
I want to have new information on my field of interest also in other languages. I would take the feed from certain news (e.g. intranet, blog) and deliver it to a translation service. With automatic feed, certain selected websites are monitored. Then, if a key word corresponds, the respective source would be delivered in my feed reader.

Second example:
I assume comments of blogs always have valuable information. So I combine different comment feeds from my colleagues’ blogs I find interesting. With that RSS feed I include a search of a database to add projects and documents of the commenters to my feed.

Is this going to happen? Gardner finishes, “As Web 2.0 empowers younger workers to manage content online in new ways, they will want to use similar approaches on the job. Should this be done via an end-run around IT?”

No related posts.

• Advocacy2.0: Network-centric advocacy
  A nice presentation about new potentials for activism over the web.
• GlobalGiving Decision Markets
  GlobalGiving is a platform to initiate projects and find partners for them. In August, they started a kind of stock-market experiment to speculate about which project has the greatest chance of succeeding on GlobalGiving.com (via Giulio)
• How wiki software is changing communication
  Although I think it is the people and not the software who change communication, this great articles describes how the United Nations use wikis, internally and worldwide, to discuss on development. “Imagine millions of people connecting with world leaders and thinkers to discuss, debate and collaborate on everything from global politics to climate change.”
• Focuss: Search engine for the development field and international cooperation
  Focuss is an effort to collect different information sources over social bookmarking and google custom search. I tested the search engine and the results were okay. However, I am, in general, not convinced about the advantage of google custom search. Does it really give better search results than a conventional google search?
• Knowledge worker2.0
  “Knowledge management (and therefore knowledge work) is largely stuck in the past, with a focus on process and tools.” A great presentation about the social and technological shift of knowledge management.
• Office 2.0 Database
  I have not seen yet anywhere else such a comprehensive list of web2.0 software for the office: From bookmarks, over group manager and presentations, to web conference.

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To continue with my post “What is enterprise2.0,” I wrote a case study for organizational blogging. Inspired by the posts from EnterpriseRSS, Paul Dunay and Splash Cast, I want to focus this time on RSS and feeds. In my opinion feeds can make a decisive difference in getting the right information at the right time in the right place, and can also reduce the email overload. As we still have to wait for the semantic web, RSS offers great potential for organizations in the following four dimensions:

1. Transmitter: Don’t email it. RSS it. Feeds deliver the latest information from themes and projects: Discussions in group blogs, solutions for problems in personal blogs, the status of documentation in wiki, interesting website through subscribed links feed, etc. This information is transparently available, showing organization wide activities otherwise hidden in email boxes. It is possible to get information from all kinds of projects inside an organization, and knowledge creation can be seen through news tickers from everybody’s browser.
2. Filter: Contrary to email push technology, feeds are a pull technology. One can decide by himself what to follow and escape the email flood. Some feeds are binding, such is the case of the department protocol or the follow-up of a milestone for a project; but most feeds can be subscribed by interest. Project steps can be easily monitored, links in a specific community of practice exchanged, or discussions can be followed. With evaluation tools such as AideRSS, valuable and most discussed content can be filtered.
3. Overview: Imagine that an intranet homepage would be like a feed aggregator. A look on the page shows exactly what is happening right in that moment in the whole organization. A feed aggregator would present all kind of feeds sorted by topic, projects, departments, date etc. Each topic or bigger projects have their own aggregator and can be browsed through tagclouds in every direction to find quickly a topic. Knowledge creation and information exchange can be followed from anywhere in the organization. Information does not have to be pushed into singly categories and limited databases.
4. Mashup: Like Yahoo pipes presented a while ago, these feeds can be easily combinable. Project developments are connected to a map application so one can see geographically where about and who it’s own organization is dealing with or discuss about it. In a multilingual organization, feeds can be redirected through translation services. Every employee can build his own aggregator and can mix data for his individual purpose.

No doubt this approach cannot be implemented easily. The problem is not technological, but it does need an open organizational culture. It does shift vertical to horizontal communication. Clearly, there can be numerous obstacles listed. The transparency must not always be in the interest of the management. It demands from the staff a great capacity to absorb all this feeds, sort, process, and digest them. Or how David Weiberger says it: “The task of knowing is no longer to see the simple. It is to swim in the complex.” Another obstacle are feed-readers, which are until now very basic and have to be further developed to easy sorting, archiving (tagging) and so forth.

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• Online platform for South Asian community development
  Still in beta, this group blog offers insights into ICT4D projects in all over South Asia. Stories are for example: wireless computer technology in Nepal or a rural ICT center along with Digital Photography Lab in Bangladesh.
• Best way to understand information and communication technologies for development
  Heloise Emdon from IDRC summarizies in his first blog post a presentation about the ABC of ICT4D (information and communication technologies for development). I like to think of his
  approach as of five dimesions to understand ICT: human, natural, financial, social and physical capital. However, in my opinion, the presentation lack some consistency.
• Ideas worth spreading: TED conference in Arusha, Tanzania
  Finally, the videos from the presenters of the first TED conference in Africa are available. In Germany the conference is unfortunately not well known although Hans Rosling’s presentation about global health history is legendary. Especially interesing and contreversial is George Ayittey’s presentation, which “unleashes an almost breathtaking torrent of controlled anger toward corrupt leaders and the complacency.” I am very eager to see more presentations.
• What is Enterprise 2.0?
  Fred Cavazza gives a detailed introduction to enterprise2.0 and developes a nice graphic schema for it. Whereas I kept my post about enterprises2.0 short, he gives technical insights, possible deployments, and elaborates on micro-blogging for internal training.

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I previously wrote on a post about the great effects that web2.0 tools can have in organizations or enterprises. This time I want to list 10 main challenges which organizations face when putting into action tools such as blogs, wikis, social bookmarking etc. I deem that it is much more about the working culture and willingness to communicate openly in a virtual network, than that of a technological question. Because these tools are all about communication and sharing, it is a decisive factor to get the participation of the users.

1. Culture: The need for an open, transparent, horizontal working culture. It is not always a prerequisite but it is conducive for effective and creative online knowledge sharing. For example, a wiki needs a certain degree of trust; not everyone wants to sit hours to check the amendments on a document.
2. Support: To have a commitment from the management for collaborative web tools. A shift to horizontal transparent communication opens new venues to present the organization’s life. It is also necessary to have support for the change management process.
3. Conviction: Having good arguments to proof why these tools are useful (needs another post). For example, they can even reduce the information overload. From my experience they clearly involve more work in the beginning, but additional value comes quickly by tagging or exchange experiences in blog posts. Idealistically, after a while, communication only shifts but is more efficient and creative.
4. Orientation: Developing a web-based communication culture needs orientation. Blogs are totally different from a workflow based intranet. Therefore a policy can help to explain the advantages and also show the limits of interaction.
5. Critical Mass: In the beginning usually only few users participate; that’s why a critical mass of contributors is important. Web2.0 tools are ideal for guerrilla marketing, where motivated contributors serve as multiplicator and can easily train others to join.
6. Resources: Be aware the tools are cheap and easy to install, but do not underestimate the resources you need. A facilitation for a blog or a wiki is very important especially in the beginning, so users are not frustrated in their first steps.
7. Patience: To incorporate web2.0 tools to an organization takes time. A few months can pass by before participation reaches a sufficient level, but on the mean time the process is exciting.
8. Training: Web2.0 might be easy but many people from the organization are totally new to the applications. Things such as tagging, RSS or basic upload functions have to be often explained.
9. Usability: Invest time in design and how to create visually your applications. Usability is very important because users shall take advantage of all features offered. For example many wikis especially lack usability. Therefore a design, documentation and help section (e.g. screencast) is decisive for users to participate.
10. Software: Implement a solution on your own server or rely on an application service provider. To which extent your organizational communication has to be internal? What can be exchanged within a networks of partner or even in public? Check out my post about how far sun microsystems went with their open blogging approach.

I also found some interesting additional information: One is an article called “Web 2.0: Ten Ways Non-Profits Can Start Leveraging Social Media“, and the second one is a nice presentation by Beth Kanter called 10 Simple Steps to Organization 2.0. Both are remixes from a great presentation by Marnie Webb.

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Imagine you can share your bookmarks with your colleagues, find your documents and emails quickly through tagging, write about your work experiences on your personal homepage (blog), and document all project team work in a wiki. The result is a revolutionary different way to share knowledge online within an organization.

How does it work and what is the trick? It simply needs to combine the already existing and freely available tools or open source applications in web.2.0.

The marker: Tagging
Tagging simply means to add key words to every link you save or blog entry you write. Basically you don’t sort anymore all your different files in hierarchical folders, you know anyhow that this is never perfectly possible. Because knowledge has always many domains e.g. a single article contains all sorts of information, each reader has a different perspectives on it. Through tags you can see where topics are overlapping and find information from different angles.

• Tagging in Wikipedia
• What is tagging?
• A social analysis of tagging with a nice visualization

The network: Social Bookmarking
Imagine your bookmarks are visible to your colleagues. You would be able to share links on similar working areas and browse via tags all imaginable topics of your organization. These links have a great value, because they are verified or even commented by your colleagues. So you find easily like minded people and identify quickly who works on a certain theme.

• Check out my bookmark tag cloud on the right column or go to my delicious network.
• Social bookmarking in Wikipedia
• Intranet Social Bookmarking: Tagging Behind the Firewall

The storyteller: Blogging
How often have you answered to the same question over again? Why don’t you make a blog post about it, so all your colleagues with the same problem could find answers in your blog. How can you exchange information without having to send a mass email? Post it on a project blog which documents the learning process of how a project has developed over time. Blogs can also become information boards, picturing the life of organizations.

• My blog post about Sun blogging
• Bookmarking, tagging, and social software comes to the Enterprise (nice podcast)

The white board: Wiki
Remember how you used to send word files around while working collaboratively on a text? Now you can have a wiki to include your project documentation in, and everyone on your team can access it form anywhere. On the Wiki, you can see how a text develops over time and browse through the organizational knowledge via tags. With a Wiki, while your team works on a memo during a meeting, you can also link topics to other relevant sources. Thus you keep track of the team work.

• Wiki in plain English
• Web 2.0 for the enterprise: Wisdom of the employees

The connector: Feed/RSS
RSS is a universal format for files which gives you, on the contrary to email, the power to filter information. A colleague always writes interesting blog posts which are relevant to your work. You want to share links in a comunity of practice, or you need to follow up certain projects. Via feeds you can subscribe to the information relevant to you. Feeds keep you posted with all sort of information, such as links, documents, audio, video, wiki changes, etc.

• RSS in plain English
• Changing the Way We Communicate Internally

Why all of this? What is the advantage?

• Simply because it connects in manifold ways all available resources and people behind it.
• It makes everybody’s work transparent and offers new potential for sharing and cooperation.
• It is very easy to use. Just look how many blogs are out there and see how successful flickr, youtube and delicious are.
• It turns communication and knowledge sharing upside down and emphasizes on expertises.

Is this realistic? Does it make an intranet obsolete? What do you think? There are of course many challenges, but I will write about it in another post.

Check out also out this nice presentation on enterprise2.0.

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Sun Microsystems’ blogging approach changes the company’s communication and knowledge management. In wikinomics I encountered Johan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun, with his unusual approach of not being him the only one blogging but also his colleagues, whom he encourages to blog publicly about their work and anything else they are interested in. His concept has an outcome of about 3000 bloggers (around 10% of all employees).

The Sun blogger Jörg Moellenkamp did an interesting presentation last April during the re-publica conference. He explained enthusiastically how he communicates directly with his clients or other programmers, and how ‘direct communication’ improved his personal learning. Beside of a policy, the basic limited rule for blogging at Sun is: don’t tell secrets. This evokes the question: “Have you ever had a situation where a blogger posted something they shouldn’t have?“, which Linda Skrocki answered in her blog. In other words Sun has shaped its own blogosphere with almost 70.000 articles mainly in the realm of its work – as a provider for network computing infrastructure solutions.

I think this blogging approach offers a combination of internal and external knowledge management offering all sorts of community of practice. Blogs contribute to codify tacit knowledge and connect people inside and outside the organization. It also offers a different concept for customer relationship management.

I asked Möllenkamp if this approach is limited to the software industry or even those ones with an open source concept? He answered that it is rather Sun’s unique culture, being it very open and putting a high level of trust in its staff. I wonder how this model could be applied to other industries or even non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? It could certainly enhance the accountability of NGOs and even more important, give opportunity to a real multiple networking for an organization in order to make their work more creative and effective. And as Allison Fine argues in her book Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected it would make members or sympathizers participants for social change.

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Recently I finished reading the book Wikinomics. I wondered whether it is just another buzzword or if it contributes to the discussion of how the Internet changes our world. In any case the authors left some answers open to be written by the readers themselves.

After reading the introduction I was fascinated to read how Dan Tapscott and Anthony Williams link different developments from the last year together and describe its implications. They argue that virtual networks, collaboration through the Internet, and the open source concept will have increasing influence on businesses, organizations and science. Those companies, which do not open up to these changes will have decisive competitive disadvantages in the future. The authors underpin their thesis with many interesting examples like Procter&Gamble’s approach to cooperate in research via innocentive.com, or a gold-mining firm, that got striking results by a innovative contest over the Internet to find new exploring methods.

“Just as collaborative tools and applications are reshaping enterprises, the new Web will forever change the way scientist publish, manage data and collaborate across institutional boundaries.”

The way the new web will change science is manifold. A key will be open access, so “the world is your research department.” An outcome will be rapid diffusion of best-practice techniques and standards, the availability of just-in-time expertise and increasingly horizontal and distributed models of research and innovation. An interesting example is how young scientists design open-source at NASA. But I wonder how developing countries have opportunities to participate in this process?

“Peer producers apply open source principles to create products made of bits – from operating systems to encyclopedias.”

Through crowd sourcing or commons based peer production new products will be developed collaboratively over the web. In my opinion this peer to peer approach is a serious alternative to traditional business models. Open source promotes this approach and is already extended to videos, music or design. The organization  for social entrepreneurs, Ashoka coined the phrase open sourcing of social change (but to have a copyright on that phrase is quite counterintuitive).

In my opinion the open source concept and the need of companies and organizations to open themselves are going hand in hand. Both are horizontal mostly bottom-up driven processes. Both indicate the need to share knowledge in an open manner. In particular the difficulty of dealing with complex problems, an overload of information and increasing competition pushes us to engage and collaborate in open networks.

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