Enterprise 2.0

Yesterday I covered the second element in the 4Cs approach to applying enterprise 2.0 to your business. Today I’ll focus on the third, collaboration.

Day Three: Collaboration

One of the biggest areas of contention is the difference between cooperation and collaboration. Put very simply, collaborative social software supports the engagement of participants in a coordinated effort to solve a problem, with shared commitment and goals, whereas cooperative social software supports informal working where there are no pre-defined goals.

In Enterprise 2.0, I investigate two social computing technologies that can enable cooperation in an enterprise setting.

Wikis

Wikis are most commonly used in organizations for ‘live’ information that constantly changes, such as documentation, although some companies and beginning to use wiki technology across their entire intranets. At European investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, IT employees started using wikis informally to document new software. They then began to migrate them into the broader workplace. After six month the traffic on their internal wiki exceeded that on the company’s intranet.

Wikis are the perfect tool for collaborative or distributed creation of content. Rather than emailing drafts of documents to multiple recipients and collating comments and changes, information can be directly edited in a single place by everyone, with the software tracking revisions. Companies reporting the most success with wikis have given participants a specific focus, such as planning a meeting or conference or creating a policy document.

Wikis do require considerable behavioural change amongst employees if they are to replace previous ways of working. Those with a publishing mentality will find the fact that a document could be in a constant state of draft somewhat uncomfortable. Others are simply not keen on changing what someone else has written without a private discussion first.

Human-based computation

Social software that uses human-based evolutionary computation allows people to contribute solutions to specific problems. These in turn inform the software enabling it to provide better information to the next person (hence ‘evolutionary’). Effectively the traditional roles of computing are reversed: the computer gets the person to do the work rather than the other way round.

Wikis are actually a form of human-based computation (contributing and editing are two examples), but essentially any kind of collaborative problem solving using technology to support the process qualifies. In its most basic form it could just be a system to capture and rank individual contributions by a wider group. The defining factor is that people, not the system, do the work of analysing and recommending. This makes it particularly useful for facilitating consensus and collective decision-making - examples include perpetual brainstorms and idea exchanges as well as internal prediction markets for business forecasting.

Summary

In the 4Cs model, collaborative social software has fewer forms but much wider use (wikis are arguably one of the most common deployments of social software in business, alongside blogs). Perhaps they suit the more formal nature of most organizations. But they also require the biggest behavourial change, which is a huge barrier to adoption.

The final C in the 4Cs model is connection. More on that tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Connection