There’s a new review of Enterprise 2.0 in town – this time from Pleon’s Daniel Penton, writing for Simply Communicate who also interviewed me last month.

Daniel’s review is practical and down to earth, a point made clear from the title “Web 2.0 made simple”. He highlights both the Oracle and Janssen-Cilag case studies that feature in the book as examples that “make a very compelling argument for Enterprise 2.0.”

He also singles out the 4Cs Approach that runs through the book, labeling it as “a practical action-led guide to employing social software within organisations.”

I was particularly interested to see Daniel picking up on the increasing friction between business and IT departments that will result as companies try to introduce these tools:

As a result, an initiative often falls over when it gets to the IT department, who are more concerned with maintaining current infrastructure than experimenting with new unproven technologies. This is one of the major challenges of widespread adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise.

He concludes that the book is “a great way to educate people new to the subject while enabling those who are already experienced in the area” and “shows how easy it can (and should) be to start experimenting with Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace.”

Who am I to argue with that?

Day Four: Connection

With social software, interaction is distributed over time, between multiple individuals and even across different systems. The tools that make connections between and within people and content are therefore critical in bringing together the other three Cs – namely communication, cooperation and collaboration.

In Enterprise 2.0, I introduce five social computing technologies that can provide these connections.

Social networking

Social networking between friends needs no introduction. In the enterprise it can be valuable when the organization rewards individual effort but perhaps needs to encourage more knowledge sharing across geographical or functional boundaries. Internal applications of social networking that mix both personal and professional interests are more likely to succeed.

Tagging

Tagging and syndication (see below) are possibly the only two technologies that are used on a widespread basis throughout all social software, to make information easier to search, discover and navigate. Tagging is the cornerstone of creating user-generated taxonomies (or folksonomies) that help people connect with information using social software and aggregate information from disparate sources into one subject-related place.

The debates rumbles on over whether folksonomies are better than formal classification systems, but Forrester Research have outlined some of the reasons the latter no longer works:

• Content creators lack time and incentives;
• Professional taxonomists are hard to justify;
• Metadata authoring tools are awkward;
• Software automation has not reached its full potential.

I recommend a hybrid approach, a combination of taxonomy and folksonomy. A ‘talksonomy’ perhaps?

Search (and social search)

Study after study shows that when it comes to searching enterprise content, employees’ expectations are not being met. The algorithmic approaches they use rely too much on the author of a piece of information to determine the search terms under which it should be found. Enterprises also have smaller corpuses of content to be searched so it is harder to aggregate the data needed to determine relevance. Nor do intranet authors have the incentives of their Internet counterparts to index their content or use links as an ad hoc voting mechanism.

Social search takes a different approach to the problem, relying on human beings to select the content that is important and index it using keywords that mean something to them. By tapping into the collective intelligence of a large group of people, social search engines build a universe of content that has gone through a process of selection, but has also been tagged.

Syndication

Syndication is the only realistic way left to filter all the information and interaction ‘noise’ that social software generates. RSS is the format that has risen to the top of the pile and is now commonplace in all forms of social software.

In the enterprise RSS has many uses, including:

• Internal communication;
• Information aggregation and syndication;
• Enterprise 2.0 collaboration.

Mashups

Increasingly, companies will want to combine many of the outputs from social software systems with existing enterprise applications and even external services. Application programming interfaces (APIs) make this a relatively quick and painless process. The result is something called a mashup – a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

Summary

That concludes my introduction to the 4Cs approach to enterprise social software planning. I hope you found it useful. There is, of course, much more detail in the book – and no doubt I’ll revisit some of the themes again in future posts.

I’d love to know if you find this approach useful – or otherwise.

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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 From Hell move

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

Today it’s the turn of the second, cooperation (or co-operation, if you prefer).

Day Two: Cooperation

With cooperation I am interested in social software that supports informal working where there are no pre-defined goals, where each contributor retains authority over their contribution, where information is shared as needed and where the software takes on the task of assembling data in order to show the combined picture.

This is in direct contrast to the third C, collaboration (which will be the subject of tomorrow’s post).

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

Media sharing

Sharing photographs and videos is possibly one of the most popular uses of social software on the public internet, but you might be forgiven for wondering what their application in a business setting could be. Admittedly sharing photos may be a little unlikely in most organizations, but video sharing has great potential for informal learning and knowledge sharing situations (Google has been quoted as wanting to offer YouTube-type technology to its enterprise customers). And it doesn’t have to be limited to images and video – presentations and documents can be just as easily shared.

Fine, you might say, but we can already share documents on our intranet. That may well be true, but social media sharing requires more:

• Everyone should be able to create, publish and share, not just a select group of authors or editors;
• They should be able to tag what they share with any keyword;
• They should be able to extend the value of others’ contributions through tagging, voting and/or commenting;
• The system should extrapolate this information to identify patterns, relationships and common groupings of content and people;
• It should also provide multiple ways for employees to filter

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  the information for themselves and for others;

Social bookmarking

In business, relatively little use has been made of social bookmarking tools even though they have applications in almost every corporate department, from research to product development and customer service to PR. In addition, being able to visualise the connections between employees and topics should benefit those with geographically dispersed and fragmented workforces.

Many knowledge management professionals baulk at the thought of employees using tags to generate the metadata on which their classification systems get based. But one of the major benefits this brings is the ability to locate expertise with the organization, by finding experts (or potential experts) based on the tags they use.

Social cataloguing

As with media sharing, just about any type of information can be subjected to the collective wisdom of the organization. Consumer-focused social cataloguing applications cover things such as academic citations, books, music, products and wireless networks. In the enterprise, it has endless possibilities.

Any type of corporate data – competitor intelligence, supplier recommendations or contact information – could be handed over to employees for collective management rather than relying on a single owner or administrator and outdated data collection techniques.

The biggest barrier to social cataloguing is managers reluctant to risk reducing their headcounts (and power bases) by replacing them with software that allows everyone to do the task and thus intermediate their reports.

Summary

Cooperative social software is very good at enabling interaction in organizations with informal cultures, but for more formal organization structures, collaborative social software may be more appropriate.

Tomorrow: Collaboration

Starting today I’m going to introduce the model for how to apply enterprise 2.0 concepts that forms the nucleus of the book. On Friday, I’ll sum up and leave you with some further thoughts.

Introducing the 4Cs

Andrew McAfee’s SLATES and Dion Hinchcliffe’s FLATNESSES models are both very good, but tend to focus on the components or characteristics of enterprise 2.0. For the purposes of categorizing the social software tools that I cover, I have used a more simple four-category classification model, focused on the action involved. It is imaginatively called “The 4Cs Approach” and comprises:

• Communication – platforms that allow employees to converse with each other, either by text, image, voice or video, or a combination thereof;
• Cooperation – software that enables employees to share content with others in both structured and unstructured ways;
• Collaboration – tools that encourage employees to collaborate with each other on particular problems, directly and indirectly, in both central and distributed ways;
• Connection – technologies that make it possible for employees to make connections with and between both content and each other.

The relationships between these categories and the levels of formality and interactions that exist in a company can be visualised thus, and should be considered within the context of the corporate culture when introducing different forms of social software into an organization:

Day One: Communication

Communication is a fundamental social process – a basic human needs as well as a basic organizational one. In organizations there are different types of communication flow: formal; downward; upward; horizontal and networked. But the one where social software can contribute most is informal.

In Enterprise 2.0, I focus on five social computing technologies that enable communication.

Discussion forums

Internal discussion forums will be familiar to most organizations as their first foray into the world of social software, although they probably didn’t recognize it as such at the time. They appeal to the command and control mindset of many IT departments as they can impose categories, rules and moderation. Discussion forums usually fail when this control restricts the type and immediacy of conversation that takes place.

Blogs

Blogs are probably the most widely known form of social software. In the enterprise, they are used knowledge management, business intelligence and project management and can, over time, provide a rich seam of intellectual capital that can be tapped into long after the original authors have moved on. Blogs generally require less formality than forums. They are less structured and do not rely on others to keep the conversation flowing.

Instant messaging

Whilst the purists might argue that instant messaging isn’t social software, it is increasingly used as a serious business tool. One of its main business benefits is the ability for each employee to have multiple ‘conversations’ taking place at any one time. In a call centre, for instance, an operator may have one chat session open with a specific colleague in a different department helping them answer a customer query, a ‘team’ session that all members of the department participate in, and a search window that provides access to previous conversations on similar topics.

Social presence

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Social presence builds on the concept of instant messaging by providing a central update mechanism that broadcasts messages from individuals to their subscribers. There are three types of social presence: informational (e.g. Facebook status updates); temporal (e.g. Twitter); and geolocational (e.g. Loopt). As well as providing a way for employees to communicate with each other, social presence can be a powerful way for the organization to keep in touch with its staff.

Virtual worlds

Virtual worlds allow peope to meet and interact with others in a computer-based spaces designed to resemble the real world (usually!). Inside companies, these ‘intraverses’ provide environments for activities such as holding meetings, conducting training or simply socializing with colleagues.

Summary

For any company investigating the world of social software, communication tools are the simplest, most inexpensive and often most effective methods of experimentation. They work best where the organizational culture is more informal and where individual effort is rewarded over group problem-solving.

Tomorrow: Cooperation