Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Michael Ricard

Michael Ricard — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 04:17:26 GMT

First, I would like to say I enjoyed the article very much. It is a very good overview of Web 2.0 and the issues raised with rolling it to the enterprise.

I administered a public sector ‘online community’ and faced the difficulties of getting members to participate by posting topics and responding to topics with their relative expertise. I tried altruism since they were an altruistic bunch being supported housing professionals in local councils around the country. But that didn’t work. I tried self-interest saying that active participation would enhance their standing in their local area and amongst their peers in the public sector as a whole.

What seemed to work best was enlightened self-interest: telling members that by helping others in the online community they were encouraging others to come to their aid in their time of need. Back scratching works to a point. I had to work extra hard at finding the communicators and fostering them because there was little or no encouragement from their own council teams. Unless members are backed by their line management, only the most committed posters will stay the course.

I have moved on to private sector corporates, and while there are the glimmerings of Web 2.0 struggling to make it in the enterprise, initiatives are being stymied by security and discipline concerns. The fear of losses in productivity are prevalent because of the ignorance of the added value improved employee communication gives to a firm. Too often good people move on and take their knowledge of the business with them. Companies pay thousands recruiting a replacement and then training them up to the approximate level of their predecessor (without their priceless empirical experiences).

A knowledgebase of employee expertise survives when employees move on. The value of this is inestimable. Employees who are asked to share their knowledge feel more valued as well, usually resulting in longer job retention. Companies who can’t see the value in sharing knowledge in the enterprise will be too dumb to survive.

Michael Ricard — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:50:21 GMT

I’m on a contract right now with a very large bank and I administer an instant messaging system. This is my first experience with this kind of instant collaboration in an enterprise setting and I find it very effective for exchanging ideas in the workplace. You can join group channels or one-to-one with other users in the bank. Everything is logged (so people know to keep everything above board, with group channels backed up and searchable.

Does IM fall into the remit for this discussion? It should because it enables knowledge sharing big time. Have any of you guys used IM in the enterprise?

Michael Ricard — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 10:55:23 GMT

Alexander, while I am a big supporter of IM in the enterprise for its ability to contribute to knowledge sharing, I can concur with your point about the de-personalizing effects. I do sometimes find myself chatting to people I sit next to instead of making eye contact and vocalizing what I want to say. A handy feature of this particular chat client is the file and image attachments which can be appended to text to enhance what I wish to express – swings and roundabouts – does this translate across the Atlantic?; aka “six to one and half dozen to another”. For busy environments where moneymaking is the chief driver, this unfortunately becomes the norm. As with all new technologies there are positives and negatives to them.

Without giving away too much sensitive business information, the search capabilities of certain IM systems allow for very detailed searches indeed. The business advantages of knowledge mining chat is one of the features which has encouraged Microsoft to add a powerful group chat system into its upcoming Microsoft® Office Communications Server and Microsoft Office Communicator, Microsoft’s server and client software for presence, instant messaging, conferencing and VoIP.

As you can imagine, once the wide user base of enterprise MS Office customers buys into group chat, the acceptance of this form of collaboration in a wide range of industry sectors will spread fast, probably seeding other forms of collaboration such as wikis and blogs. Web 2.0 in the enterprise? It’s still early days, but we’re approaching lift off.
PS – I hope the above link works; I haven’t used Public Square before so I’m not sure it takes standard HTML.