Collaboration Future?: Gartner predicts 80% adoption of virtual worlds by 2011.

Being involved in the collaboration space, it's difficult not to talk about virtual worlds and 3D collaboration space when thinking about the future of collaboration. Recently Gartner announced that 80% of active Internet users will be involved in virtual worlds such as "Second Life" by 2011. Gartner seems to be really focused on Internet platforms for virtual worlds as open social networking platforms and potential marketplaces but they caution enterprises on jumping in too soon.

What about virtual worlds specifically devoted to collaborative sessions? Is there value there? There has been a bit of buzz around Nasa's use of Second Life for collaboration but the unique aspects for Nasa is the ability to apply physics in testing in virtual world that they may not be able to do in the real world. What about plain old meetings?

I suppose the answer depends on the advantages of face-to-face facilitated sessions. One of the biggest values is the unintentional stuff. The non-verbal ques, the body language, the gestures, the side glances, the yawns, the posture, the looking around, the glassy eyes, the rolling eyes, the red eyes, the nudge, the head bob, etc.... Another advantage is simply because it's real and not virtual. It's not even the session itself but the breaks and side discussions which often hold rich value.

Technology has a long ways to go before it can 100% replace the power of face-to-face facilitated sessions. But that's not to say there isn't value in virtual worlds. In fact, research is being done that takes visual imprints of your facial features and imprinting them on your personal avatar. However, as a participant you may not want this and if it's optional would you get the benefit? If in doubt, play a game of on-line poker and then play a game of real poker!

TelePresence from Cisco is yet another option. This is the grand-daddy of video conferencing with life size video designed to mimic live interaction. It's not CGI. Check out the video hosted by John Chambers.

What are your thoughts? Where do you see collaborative spaces evolving to?

Quick Chat #6: Usability and Psychology

My personal belief is that, with grassroots empowerment provided by web 2.0 and mashups, the concept of usability in applications grows in importance and that usability could go much further then how aesthetic a web page is. There is a rich discipline in psychology that has been applied in several other industries and seems ripe to apply to the world of new collaborative tools. Paul, a colleague of mine showed me a presentation on this that re-emphasized the power of colour (amongst several other concepts) as a means for recollection and understanding. Unfortunately his copy was in black and white, but I did get the concepts... Looking forward to the colour version!

Quick Chat #5: Negation doesn't negate.

Negation isn't understood by the mind. Don't think of an elephant! I bet you just did. That's because simply negating something doesn't change the impact and visual it has on you. Those of you who are parents will know (should know) this. It's better to say "Stand over there" then it is to say "don't touch the stove". This came up in a discussion I had at a conference. Although not new to me, I found it a good reminder. Lawyers undoubtedly know this, as once a visual is created you can't simply "strike it"

Quick Chat #4: Perception

A colleague of mine, Dan, pointed out that after I had mentioned SecondLife in one of our discussions he "coincidentally" started getting other e-mails and articles that taked about it. His observation was that it wasn't that it was coincidence but rather he became aware. He discussed how the mind looks for shortcuts and quickly identifies whether something is useful or not. Those things that are not perceived as useful are discarded.

The example I would have is if you notice how after you buy a car, suddenly everyone else has bought that exact same car. So how does this apply to creativity and innovation?

Well, Dan suggests that to get the mind to see the other things around it before dismissing it, we can alter our settings. In a collaborative session for example we could add music, reposition chairs, perhaps even change the smells. This is all in attempt to make the mind more alert and open to new stimulus and not get "comfortable".

Quick Chat #3: Crowdsourcing, Chaos & Central Limit Theorem

I had an on-line chat with my friend Chris who posed the question, "Is there a danger "crowdsourcing" degenerates into so much noise that there appears to be no order to it, just thousands of disjointed opinions and mini-cliques? Does order always follow chaos? "

Interesting question. My personal opinion (although some quick research would be interesting here) is that ideas and concepts follow the same patterns as displayed in nature, specifically that they follow the central limit theorem and the normal distribution.

But this answer, draws even more concerns over crowdsourcing focusing on the average. Which depends on the situation and is an opportunity to re-think crowdsourcing and improving upon it.

Quick Chat #2: The Wicked Question

Norm introduced me to the concept of the "Wicked Question". Now this has more direct practicality. These are questions to which there is no simple answer. The Plexus Instititute defines it as:

" A question is 'wicked' if there is an embedded paradox or tension in the question. the embedded tension or paradox is an opportunity to tune to edge of chaos. This is an area of great creativity and innovation. "

Plexus discusses how to use these questions in many situations include when "the context seems overwhelming and confusing and the group needs an approach to make sense of the patterns".

Quick Chat #1: The Number 3

No it's not Sesame Street but here is a quick chat I thought I'd share

I was chatting with Norm, and of the things we briefly touched on was the number "3" which has special significance in collaboration. I had shown him the drawing illustrating the difference between communication and collaboration, and he liked the 3rd box (innovation) as if there was something there but just on the periphery. It's symbolic of going beyond the sum of parts in providing a 3rd concept. 3 appears to be used in religious text as well. We'll often hear that "1+1=3". It also reminded me of a conversation I had with Catherine who sent me some dialogue from a recent documentary on the Blue Man Group in a scene where they are making music with sticks and tubes and that it didn't become magical until the 3rd person was introduced. What is the practical application? I'm not sure. Perhaps I've seen 1 to many Jim Carey movies.

American Idol: The day the music died?

Today I saw the Queen musical "We Will Rock You" which takes place 300 years in the future. In this future, all original music is banned, and replaced with only music programmed by GlobalSoft, "Where our business is the complete appropriation of your imagination...". It even starts with a timeline that goes through some of the greatest rock milestones sprinkled with corporate manufactured examples such as Milli Vanilli, and "boy bands". At one point in the musical, one of the "bohemians" explains how they were able to track back the exact day that music died, and it was when something called... "American Idol". I am sure my friends are thinking... "Please don't say that this musical has anything to do with web 2.0?"... Well, this does..

I know I've commented on the business model of American Idol which I believe is brilliant (right up there with the way banks charge you for borrowing your money, which they lend to others, and heck let's charge them too). But what about the creativity? What about the art? Does this new collaboration mean art could succumb to corporate desires for quick profits? Unfortunately, to an extent it already has. BUT, it also provides opportunity for more artists to leverage new channels. If this is true, then we should already be starting to see indie musicians (not attached to a record label) gaining popularity, and momentum. Do we?

Crowdsourced music and art can create mass consumption products digestible by many but has no longevity or notable impact on the future of the art. It's creating the simple wine that will sold to many but the exceptional wine which requires the trained palette to appreciate could be pushed aside forever. From Mozart to Hendrix there are several examples in all genres of edgy artists pushing the limits of music who's radical art would require time to enter mainstream acceptance. If we made "America vote" as a pre-requisite for access to music would we have truly listened to the pioneers of hip-hop? As Don McLean questioned in American Pie, "Do you recall what was revealed the day the music died?"



On the other hand, I also read an article recently in the National Post about the band Arcade Fire. The article discussed how the band leveraged social forums to gather mainstream acceptance. This indie band may be an example of finally overcoming the "expert" tyranny of record labels and allowing the artists a better chance for their art to be heard before it's completely re-packaged for mass adoption. Another indie act that appears to be gaining mainstream acceptance (and is one of my favourite new bands) is Silversun Pickups pictured here.





Closer to home, a friend of mine (Dan Gagnon) a local musician has leveraged MySpace as a personal space and a digital home for his music. Only in this web 2.0 space could an individual create a global channel so quickly. He's received some very positive feedback from other more established (famous) artists. Of course simply opening up the music alone doesn't result in mass opportunity for the art to be heard. Can the long-tail be applied to his music as a pre-cursor to mainstream appeal?



The "build it and they will come" philosophy is often false and adoption usually requires active promotion. Of course promotion can also be done through several web 2.0 means as well. The 2.0 world provides coverage over the 4 P's (Price, Promotion, Place/Distribution,Product) providing freedom for the independent artist.


It will be interesting to see the clash between big corporate music and legions of independent artists both of which are leveraging the unique opportunities offered by Web 2.0.


Time will tell...

"I've been waiting for this moment all my life... But it's not quite right"
- Lazy Eye by Silversun Pickups.

Applied social computing for disaster alerting in the wake of Virginia Tech

I can't accept that a 2 hour delay in getting out critical information to the students of Virginia Tech is justified. If a simple obscenity is removed from Wikipedia on average in a couple of minutes, this horrendous massacre that took place at Virginia Tech, should have been communicated much quicker.

According to the Associated Press, students were notified by an "e-mail at 9:26 a.m., more than two hours after the first shooting. The e-mail had few details. It read: "A shooting incident occurred at West Amber Johnston earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating."

Considering the ubiquity of wireless technology and pervasiveness of social networking & chatter tools available to us there must be better, more innovative ways to get the communications out.

Yes, I realize the need to not create panic and yes, I realize that the complexities are still being understood and part of the problem was lack of decision making but what are the possibilities? Last Friday, Don Tapscott talked about the use of Google Maps in the New Orleans disaster by the general public to identify geographical locations of those needing help because the "authorities" were not able to do so. He also discussed the speed of which information was updated in Wikipedia following the bombings in London.

There is an excellent article in Wired this morning called " Lessons from Virginia Tech: A Disaster Alert System that works" that goes through several options, and how various authorities are starting to take advantage of social computing.

I don't have any concluding thoughts on this topic just a belief that we can leverage "social technology" for the societal good.

Wikinomics: Don Tapscott at Univ of Toronto April 13, 2007.

Early this morning I had an opportunity to listen to Don Tapscott speak at the University of Toronto on the topic of how collaboration drives changes in the markets. It was also named as Don's Canadian book launch for Wikinomics which was released in December of last year.

He reinforced the content of his book and discussed, how the perfect storm is comprised of the clashing web 2.0, the social revolution, the economic revolution and the net-generation. In addition to the discussion and examples, he hosted a panel comprised of an executive from HP, Oracle and Cisco (all of which were co-sponsor's of the event hand picked by Mr. Tapscott for their leadership in the wiki-revolution).

The presentation was good with some excellent examples, but I found the Panel discussion not entirely engaging. In fairness to the panel however the discussion was cut short due to time before they could really get into some deeper discussions.

When Don talked to the Oracle representative about if there was any fear from "mass collaboration" and "open source databases", the Oracle representative discussed that volume increases value and the need for companies to understand at what point to monetize value. For example, the value piece for Oracle may be in the support which they could provide and any customization would be given back to the community. The value from giving back would be to "raise the water levels" for all the boats. Personally, I still don't get the value proposition that Oracle provides here. Why don't I crowdsource the support as well?

To demonstrate the wisdom of crowds, the Oracle representative used an example that compared it to "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" game show which apparently the "Ask an Expert" provided correct answers 53% of the time versus the "Poll the Audience" which provided correct answers 91% of the time. Of course, to nitpick, it would be interesting to know when the contestants used these options (if they selected poll the audience for simple questions and ask an expert for hard question the results could be due to complexity of question)

Sun had some good examples and very progressive actions. They not only allow for corporate blogging for all employees but they actually encourage it. This would surely give most corporate lawyers a decent scare. The policy appeared to be straight forward 1 pager around using common sense, adding links to facilitate collaboration, be an active consumer as well as a producer, write about things you know and are of interest, write well, and in the end remember the blogger represents Sun even with all the disclaimers.

Cisco, had a couple of homegrown enterprise 2.0 applications they talked about. One called IZONE which sounds similar to the ID-ah!(tm) platform that I had discussed earlier. It attempts to harness the collective intelligence of the entire employee base within Cisco. Another one was CVision a YouTube for internal Cisco use. As for Web 2.0, Cisco talked about their involvement with Second Life.

I won't re-cycle through Don's material as it was very similar to his book. But I will highlight a couple of interesting stories he used.

- Geo Spatiality and digital stickiness will allow us to put a sticky on anything. Practical application is Intellizone which leverages GPS in wireless devices to determine traffic flow and therefore route planning.

- When asking a Net-Gen'er if the used e-mail. They said... Not Really. E-Mail is kind of formal. It's like writing a thank-you letter to your friends parents.

- 1/3 of Amazon.com's revenues now come from it's Open API.

- Marketocracy creates crowd sourced mutual fund.

- Pre-Release of his book Wikinomics, one of his staff decided to enter the term Wikinomics into Wikipedia and it was promptly deleted. Why? You can read the log to find out. There simply was not enough support to have it into an encyclopedia yet.

- Obscenities in WikiPedia are removed on average under 2 minutes.

- Don recently did a presentation on SecondLife complete with virtual book signing and a virtual cocktail party.

Don did spend a bit of time discussing the Economics of Mass Collaboration. With the perfect storm and the technology revolution enabling the social revolution, the economic revolution is inevitable. Ronald Coase, which Don refers to in his book as well is cited and he reiterates that the transaction costs (the costs for collaboration) that justified vertical integration have evaporated to almost nothing. In fact the cost of integration will outweigh the cost of personal outsourcing now available through the web and Ideagoras.

In the end, Don did circle back to his previous work on "The Naked Corporation" and made a last point that... In a world where you are naked... You had better be buff and know your stuff because there is nowhere to hide...

Crowdsourcing not just for technology...

It was my turn to feed my youngest daughter today and I picked up the new jar of baby food my wife had purchased and realized a new label... It was Heinz's "Mom's Recipe"(TM) and it was a quick reminder that crowdsourcing was not limited to just technology. Here is Heinz, being innovative by creating new baby foods based on recipes submitted by real moms.

Other examples I've blogged about in the past include the multitude of reality television shows where the audience selects the winner (American Idol et al), and CrowdSpirit which uses crowdsourcing for consumer electronics. Another interesting crowdsouring example is Fluevog's open source shoes where you design the shoe and several other examples are discussed on the Read/WriteWeb blog.

One of the challenges with crowdsourcing however is when it comes to truly disruptive technology or radical designs. Crowds may not be able to comprehend the concepts that a visionary provides. Steve Jobs for example was adamant that there be NO ON/OFF button on the IPod even though all the designers thought it was a must do. Some popular musicians also experienced harsh initial criticism prior to mass adoption.

All I can say is that my daughter really really liked her dinner so in this case, it seems to have paid off.

Open Space Technology & Enterprise 2.0 Rave

I recently was involved in an Open Space Technology (OST) session. For those unfamiliar with this collaboration methodology, it aims at addressing complex challenges in groups that could go up to 1000's of people. It attempts to meet needs of both the individual and the collective and is based on 4 simple principles.

1. Whoever comes is the right people
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
3. Whenever it starts is the right time
4. When it's over, it's over

The agenda is sent to potential participants, and their act of involvement identifies their desire to be part of the session. The agenda is create by the participants and facilitated by the participants. The similarities to self-organizing model in the web 2.0 space is striking and may provide you practitioners with "best practices" even as Enterprise 2.0 is only beginning.

Apparently, the inspiration for the father of OST, Harrison Owen, was attending conferences and realizing that the value of the conference wasn't in the formal presentations but in the coffee breaks. I have definitely had the same experience. And when you think about it, it makes sense. The traditional presentation is 75% of slideware and 25%f Q&A. The coffee break is 100% Q&A.

I am very excited that Enterprise 2.0 Rave is being designed to be collaborative and uses similar concepts to Open Space Technology. Currently, I am just trying to re-arrange my calendar to participate in this "Rave" and have the opportunity to collaborate on collaboration.

Will you be attending? Let me know if you are...

Four Enterprise 2.0 Success Drivers: Connectivity (Part 4 of 4)

This is part 4 of a 4 part blog on the Success Drivers for Enterprise 2.0.

Read Part 1: Desire
Read Part 2: Capability
Read Part 3: Opportunity
Read Part 4: Connectivity

Desire, Capability, Opportunity relate to the individual contributor. Collaboration is about connecting the right people at the right time. In a previous post, I talked about my sense of wonder after watching ABC PrimeTime show on 6 degrees of separation. The thing that struck me was how they connected virtual strangers around the world and the potential that offered us. If any idea or creative thought anywhere in the world was only 6 steps away, think of the breakthroughs we could make by making the right connections. But therein lies the challenge... how do we make the connection? To address the challenge there are two methods, navigation and open disclosure both of which can yield results. If it's 6 degrees for the globe, certainly an organization must be even fewer steps.

Navigate the Network (Find the Path)
If you wanted to know who are the experts in any field, a simple query into Google will allow you to find those experts relatively quickly. The page rank systems employed by Google helps prioritize and identify relevancy by identifying sites that have the most connections and references. Prior to this concept search engine results were limited and could identify web sites but not necessarily the "most relevant" sites.

We can also look at this within an enterprise. In large organizations, how do you find the "expert". One possibility is to use a "page rank" type system based on employee contributions and discussions. Another means is the use of tagging, folksonomy and social bookmarking such as del.icio.us to allow us to identify the right person, based on their contributions and their perspectives.

Q&A forums such as Linkedin's Answers allow us to identify those who are "experts" based on the value of the answers they have historically provided. This allows us to get to the right people quicker! All of these approaches identify the right people in a way that is organic and continually improved.


Open Disclosure (Let the path find you)
The analogy here is that rather than researching and trying to find a new drummer for your band, you post an ad searching for one and let the drummer come to you. What makes this so difficult in an organization is the belief that only a small group of people can provide answers. Also when it comes to sensitive information, we tend not to share and post these details.

The GoldCorp story in Wikinomics, is another great story of being open. In this situation, GoldCorp, a mining company, is about to close it's major mining facility believing it had exhausted all the gold from the site. A last ditch effort was made, and a reward was provided to anyone in the world who could find gold. GoldCorp disclosed all of its confidential information and the payback was huge ultimately saving the company and launching it into a major success. The "right" people in this case came from outside the organization and from non-traditional sources.

The firm that becomes transparent, allows it's people to connect directly without having to understand the cloud of "organizational correctness" and bureaucracy will connect the right people.

Conclusion

I hope you've found this 4 part blog of some interest and value. By addressing desire, capability, opportunity and connectivity you are well on your way to deliver a valuable enterprise 2.0 environment.

What else would you add to ensure successful enterprise 2.0 implementations? Do you have examples in your organizations that relate to these areas? Certainly there is more that can be said, and I welcome your comments and additions to this blog on success drivers.

Read Part 1: Desire
Read Part 2: Capability
Read Part 3: Opportunity
Read Part 4: Connectivity

Four Enterprise 2.0 Success Drivers: Opportunity (Part 3 of 4)

This is part 3 of a 4 part blog on the Success Drivers for Enterprise 2.0.

Read Part 1: Desire
Read Part 2: Capability
Read Part 3: Opportunity
Read Part 4: Connectivity

So far I've discussed the importance of individual desire to participate and the need to ensure those that participate have the capabilities to effectively collaborate. The third pre-requisite for Enterprise 2.0 success is opportunity.

You may have the skills, technology and even the want to collaborate in the exciting enterprise 2.0 world but you also need the opportunity. Opportunity is a lot more than simply having managers saying "Go and collaborate". To provide opportunity, organizations need to be specific about the objectives for each individual so they can collaborate and organizations need to adopt governance models that don't restrict collaboration but filters out collaboration killers.

Individual Objectives
A key concept of Enterprise 2.0 is the self-organizing communities. In most organizations, this organic model is not possible because we try to clearly identify all tasks and objectives upfront with clear measures of success. The problem is that it constrains the individual to be inflexible. If it's not in their objectives will they do it?

To overcome this I would suggest you need an objective that allows people the opportunity to self-organize. For example, Google's infamous 20% self-direct time for it's developers accounts for virtually all of it's innovations. Google isn't the first to implement such a thing. 3M has also had success with this model way before Google.

Even if a firm doesn't adopt the 20% concept, they can still achieve value by the simple act of asking. Asking their people for help and providing them the time to do so. I've had experiences where senior executives pulled front-line workers off the job for several days to allow them to collaborate on resolving challenges in process. That simple act opened up the door for future employee engagement and started un-doing the damage caused by years of top-down order given jobs. In an Enterprise 2.0 world we also need to provide people the time to contribute.

Corporate Governance
An extremely conservative organization will impose heavy governance on all enterprise 2.0 type technologies. Their belief is that enterprise 2.0 is not worth the risk. They see wasted time and unprecedented unproductive time. Fears of a hostile workplace, anti-management rhetoric with the potential for cyber-bullying dominate their concerns. Blogs in this environment will be limited to the few, and each comment will be carefully reviewed and only select comments posted. Social forums would be seen as even more risky and further governed. The only reason this type of firm would even adopt these technologies is more for optics than in the belief in it's value. The Collaborative Thinking blog has a good article on this.

There should be no surprise that the over-governance will lead to the lack of opportunity to participate. Ultimately it will restrict that value of enterprise 2.0 technologies. The classic example of this is Nupedia, the predecessor to Wikipedia. Although there are many arguments as to why Nupedia failed, the common argument is the bottle-neck authoritarian governance model which didn't provide the opportunity for mass collaboration was to blame.

In some organizations there is a huge fear that others will perceive the company as "weak" because it embraces the informal. Some managers believe that only structured interaction can lead to innovation. Heaven forbid, that people find out that the innovation came by "fluke" and wasn't planned. The reality is, informal interaction leads to innovation. Rather than cover that up, embrace that and create environments for that to happen.

The extent to which you create these informal interactions will vary. It can by physical real-estate decisions, traffic analysis (ie placement of the water cooler) and to the other extreme it may be through social forums such as Facebook or virtual worlds like SecondLife.

I am not proposing that a firm buys social software and says "ok everyone go and be informal". The difference between web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 is that the firm is the driving force with specific objectives. This reinforces the need for governance/management to an extent.

Where as the first 3 parts of this blog have focused on the individual (desire, capability, opportunity). The next and final blog in this 4 part series will discuss the fourth aspect which is about Connectivity. After all, by definition, collaboration requires more than one person.

Read Part 1: Desire
Read Part 2: Capability
Read Part 3: Opportunity
Read Part 4: Connectivity

Four Enterprise 2.0 Success Drivers: Capability (Part 2 of 4)

This is part 2 of a 4 part blog on the Success Drivers for Enterprise 2.0.

Read Part 1: Desire
Read Part 2: Capability
Read Part 3: Opportunity
Read Part 4: Connectivity

The last post talked about individual desire to collaborate as a necessary pre-requisite to driving success from an Enterprise 2.0 deployment. This post talks about feeding that desire with capability. When I speak of capability it's really in two areas: Technology & Skills.

Technology

This is the most widely discussed area of enterprise 2.0. Perhaps the best model that explains the technology is the SLATES (search, links, authorship, tags, extensions) framework by Andrew McAffee. I think the following summary by Dion Hinchcliffe is pretty good.

"SLATES describes the combined use of effective enterprise search and discovery, using links to connect information together into a meaningful information ecosystem using the model of the Web, providing low-barrier social tools for public authorship of enterprise content, tags to let users create emergent organizational structure, extensions to spontaneously provide intelligent content suggestions similar to Amazon's recommendation system, and signals to let users know when enterprise information they care about has been published or updated, such as when a corporate RSS feed of interest changes. "

This technology allows us to collaborate in ways that we previously were not able to do. IBM for example has been a prime example through their World Jam that was able to connect IBM employees around the world within a 72 hour window to collaborate. We could never have brought 50,000 people to collaborate effectively in any other medium.

Providing these tools such as wiki's, RSS, blogs, etc.. provides the starting point. The second part however is making sure people know how to collaborate with these tools and have the right skills.

Skills

Collaboration is definitely not a "new" word. There has been so much learned in the art and science of collaboration. The whole organization itself is an attempt to create a collaborative environment. However simply putting out tools, or creating an organization will not just result in capability. We need to teach our people how to properly collaborate.

This ranges from etiquette, to psychology, to simple best practices in communication. Although I have previously emphasized the importance of "extreme simplicity", we need to also train our people on how to collaborate and use the tools. This isn't just about how to use the technology but how to communicate in a collaborative fashion. Sure depending on the complexity of the technology in question (i.e. mashup technology vs wiki) we may need to spend time on training people on the technology but far more important is training people on how to collaborate.

Together, technology and skills provide us capability. The next blog will discuss the third pre-requisite... Opportunity

Read Part 1: Desire
Read Part 2: Capability
Read Part 3: Opportunity
Read Part 4: Connectivity

Four Enterprise 2.0 Success Drivers: Desire (Part 1 of 4)

This is part 1 of a 4 part blog on the Success Drivers for Enterprise 2.0.

Read Part 1: Desire
Read Part 2: Capability
Read Part 3: Opportunity
Read Part 4: Connectivity

One of the pet peeves I have is the notion that electronic collaboration tools could replace face-to-face facilitated sessions. This is absolutely untrue. the tools are exactly that... tools... Yes, the self-organizing communities is an important piece to web 2.0 but when we talk about enterprise 2.0, we have an opportunity to go beyond this.

The motives of the individual in web 2.0 are their own motives. I blog on a topic because I want to blog on a topic. I join an organization because I want to join an organization. In the enterprise however, the tasks we need to accomplish aren't always things I want to do. I may not have any desire to collaborate.

In fact, in most profit driven organizations, not only are there tasks I don't want to do but I may actually be penalized for "collaborating" with others if it doesn't align with my department objectives. For example a help-desk call-centre may have a goal on delighting each customer in the shortest time possible but the sales department may want to maximize sales revenue through the call centre. Both valid goals, but one has an impact on the other. These 2 departments are not incented to help one another.

In the firm, even if people are not self-motivated, we still need them to collaborate. This talks to the first aspect of the drivers for collaboration (Desire). Try as you may, you can't really force people to collaborate and expect great results. There are things however that should be looked at to make sure people want to collaborate. I'll discuss 4 of these areas:

1. Recognition
It starts with understanding what the firm needs to achieve at a macro level and designing appropriate incentives and recognition. Those things that get rewarded get repeated. Not everyone will like these type of incentives but that's the point. You want to draw people that want to collaborate and will be compensated for that. It can be small recognition programs to large compensation models depending on the situation.

2. Organizational Structure
Organizational structure also affects desire. For example if the organizational model was built based on core processes (Order to Cash) instead of traditional functional departments (Sales, Procurement, Finance, IT) there would be one objective on process change instead of 4 separate objectives. I have previously discussed organization models that are hybrids of self-organizing and hierarchical models.

3. Trust
Trust is perhaps the most difficult piece to sustain. You can always change structures and even compensation systems but trust is on-going and you screw it up once and it's a long road to regaining it. Why is this important to desire? Well if you ask me for help and I provide it but you do nothing with it, I am not likely to offer you as much help the next time. If i don't trust the executives of the organization and think I am being duped, I am not likely to cooperate.

4. Transparency
Transparency, which is related to trust is also about explaining how this all comes together. How my individual input fits into the big picture and delivers value. A firm can build trust through transparency.

If the individual isn't motivated to collaborate then I don't care what tools you put in place, it doesn't matter. Hoever, If you have a motivated individual then we have a start. The next blog will talk about the 2nd Success Driver: Capability

Read Part 1: Desire
Read Part 2: Capability
Read Part 3: Opportunity
Read Part 4: Connectivity