five common collaboration tool errors

I was presenting on collaboration tools last week and I was reflecting on five common mistakes made in the selection or implementation of these tools that I have seen (or even participated in at one time or another) before launching into descriptions of the tools themselves and some case studies. Here are the five members of the hall of shame:

1. The No Goal Error. Not having a purpose or objective behind what you are doing. What will people be using this for? Does what you are asking them to do matter to them? (N.B. "collaboration" is not a goal in itself). Warning Sign: "We put in a x because we thought it would be, y'know cool". Nothing Wrong With: There is no upside to this one.
2. The Magic Bullet Error. Thinking that one tool will do everything for you. There are a range of tools out there and no one application (or platform) does everything equally well. Warning Sign: "We plan to do everything in x, the sales guy/evangelist for x said it will do everything we need". Nothing Wrong With: If something works well in more than one situation then by all means use it.
3. The New New Thing Error. Deciding to deploy something because it is new rather than based on its merits to meet your purpose (N.B. You do have a purpose don't you?) Warning Sign:"One of our directors read about x in an in-flight magazine, we have to implement x tomorrow". Nothing Wrong With: Experimenting with new tools (with all that the word "experimenting" implies).
4. The If I Wear Brad Pitt's Suit, I'll Look As Hot As Brad Pitt Error. Just because another organisation gets good results with a certain tool and set up, it does not mean that you will also. My body is not the same shape as Brad Pitt's nor is my face as pleasantly arranged, hence his suit will probably not have the desired effect. Your organisation and your culture are not the same as somewhere else and context is important. Warning Sign: "Organisation Y (in the building next door but a completely different industry) just implemented x and it went great for them, why don't we do it?" Nothing Wrong With: Learning from the experiences of others and listening to intelligent case studies.
   
5. The Titanic Error. It's not the parts of the iceberg that you can see that you should be worried about. Successful collaboration is about many intangible things (leadership, trust) and yet people focus on what they can see - i.e. the tool. Warning Sign: "I want an online community, show me how to customise the skin on Ning". Nothing Wrong With: Paying attention to design and usability and making it all look good.

I suspect you will have seen (or written about) versions of these before. I also suspect you will have seen others.

collaboration models (1)

James Robertson has developed this three-tiered model for collaboration. I like it. However there are two comments I would make:

• I'm not sure it's a fully-fledged model yet. It's a checklist of things that impact an organisation's ability to collaborate grouped into 3 areas. More map than model. How do these things interact?
  
• James writes: There are many elements of collaboration, and we often encounter the “blind men and the elephant problem”. We’re all talking about collaboration, but we’re actually discussing different parts of the animal. I think there's an additional issue. There are not just different elements to collaboration but there are different kinds of collaboration (that based around project teams vs virtual communities for example) that require different individual skills, models, tools, governance approaches. I don't get a sense of that from this.
  

collaboration open space

So in the comments on the Open Publish post, Michael Sampson pulls me up. We were all talking about the human aspects of collaboration weren't we? I'd disagree. We were still talking about the human aspects of collaboration technologies. Which given the audience at OP is not necessarily a problem. But where in the environment for IT folks & KM folks & HR people & internal comms dudes & facilitators & suchlike. And even regular ordinary workers?

I'm not sure there is anywhere (please feel free to prove me wrong).

So I want to run an Open Space event around "collaboration". Only we probably won't use that term as such. Suggestions for a better one please. I dunno whether this will be 20 people in a church hall or 1000 people at the exhibition centre. You tell me.

I'll need the following:

• Volunteers/helpers/collaborators from different disciplines.
• Sponsors. I ain't gonna make any money out of this but if we want a big location then it's gonna cost $20-30k.
• And you. Yes, you.
  

open publish redux

So a major theme at Open Publish 2008 was "collaboration".

• Brett Jackson (in his capacity as a recently-departed employee of Atlassian) started off well, dipped into a puff-piece and then came good in the end.
• Michael Sampson talked about expertise location & some other collaboraty stuff.
• Cairo Walker talked about working with the WWF - and included some interesting facts about bees & elephants.
• James Robertson had some interesting points about collaboration - including the distinction between the internal (collaboration) & external (publishing) roles of team collaboration.
• Nerida Hart presented on the LWA work she has been doing.

I have two concerns with all this talk of collaboration:

1. Keeping the focus purely on collaboration technology rather than all the other elements.
2. Making it concrete & specific. Who wants to collaborate on what and why? Because not all collaboration situations are the same and what works well for a co-located team will not work for a global community of interest. "Collaboration" (like "knowledge" or "innovation") is a word that covers a multitude of sins.

collaboration tools: centricity

Most social software tools have a focus, a centricity. The focus of that tool will effect your use of it. You can try using Facebook as a wiki but it won't really work - because the focuses of each are different. Here are some suggested focuses. What would you change? What would you add?

[In fact, wouldn't this blog post be better as a wiki page?]

Tool	Centricity
Wiki	Page
Blog	Post
Tangler	Forum / Thread
Flickr	Image / Account
Facebook	Ego-based Network
Ning	Community
YouTube	Clip

extending the event horizon - collaboration tools

The triggers for this pondering of collaboration tools have been a bunch of events that I am in some way involved with. Many are conferences (or sometimes unconferences). The aim is to "Extend the Event Horizon" (thanks Katie) both before and after the event - should participants want to do so.

Before: Sydney Bar Camp used both a blog - for news releases- and a wiki - for registration. NSW KM Forum also uses a blog for announcements.

During: The Enterprise 2.0 Forum used Tangler as a virtual interaction environment and several people were Twittering like crazy during Bar Camp Sydney. Second Life is becoming the place to do virtual events but I'm not so sure about that.

After: This is up for grabs. A key factor here is the technical savvy of participants. You may just want to stick with an email list. A step up from that might be a Facebook group. I think Facebook makes a pretty rubbish collaborative environment beyond simply pumping out information to interested parties. As Axel Brun (thanks Gav) puts it very well, it's too ego-centric, it mixes up all your relationships in one big pile of social slop & the activities you can engage in are pretty rudimentary. But then a nightclub is not the same environment as an office. Like Axel, I've developed a taste for Ning. If you want your event to be part of something longer-lasting, then I'd go for something Ning-y. But you (& your participants) might not have the appetite for something longer-lasting. In which case, the quick & dirty options (e.g. email) are just fine.

collaboration tools: stags

I've been thinking about different collaboration tools for various groups recently and I was pondering on some of the different factors you need to consider and I came up with this (click to enlarge):

Let's take each of these in turn:

Size - One thing to consider are the numbers of people who will be collaborating. Three rough groups sizes come to mind:

• Teams (15 approx) - small number of people. Most collaboration in our world that is aimed at doing stuff (as opposed to talking about doing stuff) probably occurs in teams of 5-30 people.
• Tribes (150 approx) - departments, small businesses, communities of interest, Christopher Allen's groups, will have 60-200 active members (plus as unspecified number of blow-ins, lurkers, guests, etc). Note: There may be 300+ people registered as users but the actual number of participants will be far lower. There will probably be less collaborative work and more discussion / show 'n' tell.
• Wide-scale (150+) - Examples here might be IBM's WorldJam.

Assertion: Above 6 people, the size of a group is inversely proportional to its ability to get things done.

Timeframe - The time period over which people will be working together is also important and again I have gone for 3 rough divisions:

• Synchronous (o seconds delay) - I need to work with people now. N.B. There is probably a limit to the number of people I can work with at once without going insane. It is probably less than I think.
• Ephemeral (1 min to 1 week) - It will be over relatively quickly. Longevity & content persistence are minor issues here.
• Project (1 week to 1 year) - For collaboration with a defined start and end.
• On-going - It might be collaboration within an official group (a department) or an unofficial group (a community) but we don't know when it'll stop. Content persistence is important here.

Activities - When people collaboration, they need to do stuff. So this list is a little arbitrary. I'm sure that there's more that could go in there. But for me critical areas are:

• Discussing - Talking about stuff. Ideally in a threaded environment so it's possible to track discussions.
• Planning - Identifying tasks & their dependencies, giving those tasks timeframes & assigning people to those tasks. Project Management 101.
• Creating - Probably co-creating written content to begin with (but also mindmaps & images). Yes I'm talking wikis here.
• Sharing - Sharing documents - be they individual word/excel/ppt files or collaborative wikis/google docs. Also media files - images, audio & video.
• Commenting - marking up documents & adding tags / commentary. BTW I have been having a look at QSR's Nvivo - which allows you to tag sections of audio & video files. This is a product aimed at social science researchers (with a price tag to match) - but there are obvious applications of this in the consumer space.

Geography - I'm not going to say too much about this but basically the more dispersed by space, timezone and culture the collaboration participants are, the more you need to make explicit and the less you can rely on workarounds. Persistence & easy finding of content is critical.

Similarity - So are these people all from the same organisation (with the same culture & infrastructure)? Or do they come from many organisations? This could also be called Security. Do I want to keep our collaboration private or am I happy to have it open to the world?

These are just the things that I've been thinking of. I'm sure that you could come up with more.

Collaborative Mindmapping

Thanks to Kim, I've been playing with mind42 - a collaborative mindmapping tool. Based on one of my current obsessions, I have put together a mind map on email.

Feel free to dip in and have a play around (N.B. you have to sign up).

UPDATE: Unfortunately, it looks like I need to imvite you to join so you can edit. If you would like to do so, please drop me a line.

35 trillion emails - and they're all yours

Alex picks up on the email post and indicates that if you cross reference that with the number of actual net users it jumps to 79 per day. If we take this a step further, then what is the distribution of emails by user? I suspect it may be some kind of power law - with a small number of addresses sending and receiving the bulk of the email and a large proportion of the population sending and receiving very little.


There is also probably an asymmetry - those sending the bulk of the emails are not the same as those receiving them.

Alex makes a point about email overload. Email has been a victim of its own success. And it's impact over the last 15 years has been revolutionary. But we need to think about the shape of the post-email age. Is it going to be dizzying mess of email AND IM AND wikis AND other stuff..?

Collaboration vs sharing

James Robertson talks about collaboration tools as anti-knowledge sharing. If I understand JR correctly, his point is that collaboration tools are great for specific teams. However each team works in its own context and this leads to the creation of silos which prevents cross-organisational leveraging of this material. He also notes that this cannot be solved simply by the implementation of a search tool.

I agree with him. A big part of the role of KM (or whatever you want to call it) is the development of shared contexts between groups within an organisation because without that shared context you can't transfer anything. One approach is to develop common methods, taxonomies & languages for teams. N.B. This is a non-trivial task and many groups won't follow something imposed on them from outside. Nevertheless, allowing groups to identify commonalities in their work is an important part of that. Another aspect are human connections between teams - are people moved between groups or are those silo walls impenetrable?

Michael Sampson says that this is a governance issue - which I think James agrees with.

As both Michael & James note, most of the material in these collaboration spaces is not actually relevant to other groups - i.e. the fact that it is not shared is not an issue. The issues are:
1. Predicting what does need to shared (tricky).
2. Encouraging people to put in that extra bit of time to make it available (trickier).

What am I doing with my hands?

About a month ago, Alex Manchester from Melcrum said: "We're doing a set of videos on Enterprise 2.0, fancy being a part of this?" And I said yes.

Witness the extent of my folly here. Alex has done a grand job of cutting out some of my stupider comments & facial expressions.

Meanwhile, Ross Dawson carries it off like the old pro he is.

ROI encore

Luis continues to write about social computing ROI here and here. I admire his tenacity. Remembering that ROI calculations are an attempt to render assumptions, beliefs & wishes into a quantitative language, then surely the ROI for social computing tools (& I agree with Luis that these are fundamentally social tools) will vary from depending on the assumptions, beliefs & wishes of the organisations concerned.

The point that they can improve social capital is valid one - but only if senior management in an organisation care about it. How robust are most attempts to quantify social capital?

Maybe you can quantify it into "improved customer satisfaction" or "decreased marketing costs" or "higher employee engagement".

I still believe (& I will repeat this until I am blue in the face) that showing the value of social software is problematic precisely because we have a poor collective understanding of what our employees do & how they do it. And provided they keep churning stuff out, we don't really care.

Presencing Portals

Historically, portals have been all about aggregating content & applications into one easy-to-digest package, more or less personalised to the preferences of the user. Typically this has been about access to data or content rather than access to others.

What has impressed me about Facebook and MySpace (to an extent) is a different version of portal that they offer. MySpace's blogs and Facebook's status sections create a kind of presence portal. I can see where people are, what they are up to, etc. Jasmin highlights some potential privacy pitfalls with this. And they are potentially serious.

I could talk about Privacy 2.0 here but that would be a trifle onanistic. I think we need to get a better handle on our own privacy here. What we tell people. We need to get back in touch with the lost art of keeping a secret. The pleasures & securities of mystique. The more opportunity there is to open ourselves up, the more pleasure there is to be gained from refusing to do so.

From a business perspective, we may be interested in letting others see where we are and what we are doing. Or we may not. Depending on culture & objectives. Depending on who is sticking dollar bills in our garter belts.

Web 2.0 is nothing more or less than a strip-tease (a lucrative industry that I have always been too unnerved by to engage with).

But which side of the lights are you on?

Engineers with fears

Kolya posts this "Fear of Web 2.0" article on Facebook while Stephen Aciiidlabs talks about this News Ltd article that inexplicably fails to link social media with donkey molestation.

Richard MacManus refers to 2 Forrester reports*. Now the first one says that IT departments are wary of social software. This confirms lots of observations (& links nicely to my E2.0 Q&A). I actually have a lot of sympathy for the guys in the IT department. Like many people who work in infrastructure roles, they only ever get noticed when things stuff up. The gun salesman gets to boast about his multi-million dollar deals. Rarely do people run around saying: "IT brought in the expense system on budget, we must open the champagne!"

This can make IT dudes very risk averse. So when the news headlines talk about Facebook carjacking the CFO, they cover their asses. I think Richard's point about a reluctance to give up control is also valid - but that's as much about CYA as it is about a lust for power.

The statistic that interested me was:

Forrester puts the current figure of people using Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise at 15% - and usage is higher at smaller companies.

This aligns itself with anecdotal evidence I have been hearing over the last few months. There is a small but growing number of people applying these tools in their everyday lives. And smaller companies have less sunk IT cost in exploring these technologies. They often have tiny, stretched IT shops as well - who are quite happy to devolve responsibility to others where appropriate.

*Forrester's research in the Enterprise 2.0 space is turning out some genuinely useful information. I just wish they covered Australia as well.

More collaboration

James Dellow takes up the conversation about collaboration. James D makes the point that collaboration happens within organisations & that people will use any tools that come to hand. Absolutely agree with this. James goes on to say:

This cycle by the way is taking place at an enterprise level, but also at the level of individual workgroups, teams and projects. This leads me into another observation, that it looks like this process assumes that the collaborative technologies are in place and working but they are just not integrated in a content sense.

So James D it again right here. And it prompts me to wonder if James R's model is actually more of a maturity profile around the management of collaboration tools than about tool adoption per se.

James R meanwhile responds to both of our comments:

I certainly agree that phase 4, is a "nirvana" state and that phase 3 is the goal for the next 1-3 years. I don't believe we can even articulate what "coherence" would really look like yet, although vendors are busy promising it via their solutions. My experience, though, is that we need to "capture the high ground" in these models, explicitly including the longer-term vision. Without this, these models are too quickly ignored when a "sexier" approach comes along. My goal was also to highlight that there are three big phases that come first, before attempting to tackle phase 4...

Still, I agree that it is always dangerous to paint a picture of the "holy grail", particularly if this is taken on by over-enthusiastic senior execs. Matt, any thoughts on how to find a middle ground between the two extremes of no vision and looking too high?

So I agree that a vision is necessary but could it be more around the organisation's collaboration capabilities than a specific end state (e.g. a collaboration tool portal)? It's not so much coherence as the ability to know what tools are being used & how currently, to identify gaps in current capabilities & to look at filling those gaps, & to be proactively looking at the application of new tools.

Does the organisation know what its collaboration portfolio is? Now this portfolio might be accessed via a portal but it's actually about what the organisation can do. Now I think you could make this a compelling story but it does sound like more work than just installing a vendor product.

Collaboration tools

James Robertson has been thinking about collaboration tools. Which is interesting because I have as well. As ever, James is practical & clear in his thinking and suggests a 5 phase model (0-4) for organisations thinking about collaboration. So here are the phases and my responses to them:

Phase 0: Fragmentation
As the usage of collaboration tools grows in an unmanaged and unconsidered way, so does the "fragmentation" of information. Key information is divided into ever-smaller spaces, locked up out of broad use, generating considerable information management and knowledge management problems. (This is not a search problem.)

Agree with this - and not only the fragmentation of information but the fragmentation of activities, relationships, etc. N.B. This is bad.

Phase 1: Gardening
The starting point is to identify an overall owner for the collaboration tools, and to put in place simple governance, policies and management. Rather than trying to restrict usage, the approach is one of "gardening", helping to guide usage , connect the dots and identify best practices.

Also broadly agree with this. Except that gardening might be the wrong word. This is about identifying the existing collaboration tools within an organisation. What they are. Who uses what. What activities they are used for. And then how these different tools might fit together. And where the gaps between them might be. Something like mapping perhaps? The concept of guiding usage is critical here - "Just enough governance".

Phase 2: Business solutions
The next step is to identify key (and common) needs, and build solutions that are tailored to meet them. In this way, clear user needs can guide how to bring together different solutions (wikis, blogs, lists) into more coherent solutions. Possible targets include project collaboration, teaching or e-learning, collaborative authoring, communities of practice or research.

Nothing to disagree with here. Using the map to produce repeatable toolsets.

Phase 3: Rich networks
Organisation-wide collaboration will only be achieved with the silos are broken down between different spaces. This involves recognising the difference between "inwards" and "outwards" facing spaces, and putting in place processes for sharing and linking between them.

Now many organisations are currently in phases 0 & 1. Several are starting to move to phase 2. Are there any out there that have reached phase 3? These rich networks will almost certainly be a federated model.

Phase 4: Coherence
This is the end goal, where there is coordination between the collaboration spaces at all levels, accessed through a personalised portal-like interface. The lines between different "tools" is blurred, creating a single working environment. (There's a lot to be done before anyone can reach this state.)

I look at phase 4 and go "yeah, right". The collaboration tool space is changing very quickly at the moment. Phase 4 feels like a utopia at the moment. And given this dynamic environment, a very unlikely utopia. I think many organisations have enough on their plate trying to get to phase 3. I would feel nervous talking about phase 4 because I can just see a senior exec going: "This sounds great, I want one of these by the end of the month!" and mayhem ensuing. What is more likely in the next 1-3 years are rich networks (collaborative ecosystems) and then richer networks - with tools dropping in and out. "Coherence" feels way too static to me as a goal at the moment.

What do you think?

Enterprise 2.0 Questions & Answers

So when you start talking about Enterprise 2.0 stuff, certain questions keep coming up. Here are some of the ones that I have heard from people in different organisations.

• Have you heard similar ones?
• Which other ones have you heard?
• Do my answers make sense?
• Do you have better answers?

1. We've had Forums / Lotus Notes around for ages. What's new about these tools?

Some social media technologies have been around for a over a decade. What is new is their pervasiveness on the internet and the way they are now leveraged to make connections. They are significantly simpler than previous enterprise collaboration technologies. However some (e.g. podcasts, social networking software) are genuinely new in the corporate environment.

2. Will these tools by themselves make people collaborate?

Implementing a wiki will not lead to collaboration by itself. However the simplicity of these tools can provide very usable platforms for groups (teams, communities, directorates) to achieve their collaborative goals.

3. Are they just fads?

Some deployments of these tools are faddish. However, many organisations are experimenting with them and seeing benefits. The longevity of some of these tools (e.g. blogs have been around for over 10 years) suggests there is more to them than "cool" value.

4. Do they fit into our IT architecture?

They certainly can. Our IT architecture should not quash experimentation & innovation but it should position it correctly. "Just enough" governance of these tools is a critical part of their implementation.

5. Won't more tools just confuse people?

If we are not clear on its role then any new tool is confusing. If there is a clear role for a new tool then we need to communicate it to potential users and position it next to other tools. This is another governance issue.

6. Are their security risks associated with these tools?

If they are implemented poorly there could be a security risk but then this is true for any communications technology. If users are clear on what they should and should not share then security risks are minimal.

7. How will we manage all this content?

Some social media tools promote content management (e.g. folksonomies & social networking software) through non-traditional means. From a broader perspective, we need to examine the findability for all of its content – not just social media. Robust search and analytics tools are critical for effective management of these resources.

Wiki highlights

Patrick Lambe proposes a "wiki raid". I like that this uses wikis with a team in a room together around a real business task. It cements the idea of the wiki as something simple, useful, quick & collaborative. In effect you are establishing wiki behaviours up front. I may well be stealing this shortly.

James Matheson & Andrew Mitchell were both talking more wikis at the NSW KM Forum last night.

Andrew talked about 3 kinds of info his team's wiki: Eternal Truth (stuff that is correct for a long period), Past Truth (stuff that was once useful but is no longer current) & Collaboration (stuff that multiple people are working on now).

James talked about 3 specific wiki behaviours:

1. If you have something to write, write it on the wiki.
2. If you need to send an email, send a link to the wiki page.
3. Check the recent changes.

So there you have it - go forth & wiki.

Wiki reliance

About a month ago, I was talking to a friend involved with wikis & collaboration at a major corporate. The thorny issue of "governance" came up. What do you need to manage with a wiki. Now part of this relates to the previous post around where wikis fit in with the plethora of other collaboration tools that most organisations have. The other issue is one of "reliance". So if a group (a team or a community) is using a wiki for their own purposes, that's OK. If other people come to rely on their content in a major way, does this then need to be managed more tightly. What do you do about "reliance"? Do you end up moving from the left to the right of the "after" diagram here. And if so, how do you make that decision?

Now if your organisation has decided that your wiki is your intranet, not really an issue. The thought that came to my mind was: viewer metrics are key here. If you have a team of 10 people working on something and only 10 people visit those pages, no worries. If 10,000 people visit those pages then that may indicate that this stuff is becoming important. And hey, it might even be worth investing in developing this content more.

What do you think?

Collaborative ecologies

So everyone is playing with enterprise wikis, quietly. James Dellow outs CSC's wiki efforts. In trying to make sense of the ways in which wikis are being used, the following diagrams came to mind.

First, the "before":



And then the "after":



The basic point here is that whilst a few organisations are using wikis as their whole intranet, most people are using them to replace / augment the standard content collaboration tools found in organisations i.e. email & MS Word.