Technology pundit Mike Elgan says we’re evolving a new paradigm for the workplace as technology makes it easier for white collar workers to engage in location-independent employment. These “digital nomads” will be able to travel the world or go to locations where there are partners or customers for both personal reasons and on behalf of the company.

Found via Experientia (“Technology will allow us to become digital nomads“)

Yes, the online, networked generation, working in geographically dispersed teams must and will make broad use of collaboration tools for work purposes. And as these tools are becoming cheaper it helps too (now, I doubt whether we will really see low-cost web conferencing as soon as Mike Elgan says – yet it’s no problem, teamworking with fellow digital nomads is probably a bit easier than regular corporate collaborative work …)

Posted via web from frogpond’s posterous

Why do some teams fail to use their members’ knowledge effectively, even after they have correctly identified each other’s expertise? This paper identifies performance pressure as a critical barrier to effective knowledge utilization. Performance pressure creates threat rigidity effects in teams, meaning that they default to using the expertise of high-status members while becoming less effective at using team members with deep client knowledge. Using a multimethod field study across two professional service firms to refine and test the proposed model, I  lso find that only the use of client-specific expertise (not the expertise of high-status members) enhances client-rated performance. This paper thus reveals a paradox affecting teams’ use of members’ knowledge: the more important the project, the less effective the team. This paper contributes to the emerging literature linking team-level expertise utilization (instead of just recognition) with performance outcomes and also adds a novel, team-level perspective to the literature on inter-firm relations.

This is close to being an organizational collaboration pathology – huh? Now, it’s clear that having some slack time to build up social capital is essential (for building up trust and more – we’re talking of forming, norming, storming phases in teams) while in reality teams don’t always get that time (it’s a fast-paced multi-project world after all).

But putting on the heat on teams with an overblown performance focus seems to aggravate effects we know by the name of group think (and the related fall-back to well-established patterns when the going gets rough). And group norms kill creativity:

Unfortunately groups only rarely foment great ideas because people in them are powerfully shaped by group norms: the unwritten rules which describe how individuals in a group ‘are’ and how they ‘ought’ to behave. Norms influence what people believe is right and wrong just as surely as real laws, but with none of the permanence or transparency of written regulations…the unwritten rules of the group, therefore, determined what its members considered creative. In effect groups had redefined creativity as conformity.

Now what role may social software play in this situation? I agree that just mimicking Xing or LinkedIn in the hope of supporting and facilitation intra-company knowledge networks is bound to fail (and more, it’s following a flawed paradigm, social networks in companies should be understood as emergent properties of this complex social system we call organization). Designing the knowledge environments (and tools) for smart and action-oriented workers tasked with creative jobs is not easy (and very dependent of actual context too), letting the connections between interdependent teams simply emerge is a challenge. Just think of the various relations we entertain to people not in our actual company network (freelancers, alumni, competitors and complementors, partners, …), these are complex systems too:

Picture to the left by Idris Motee who understands the need for interdisciplinary creative thinkers

Morison et al.s “idea in brief”:

Your company is continuously creating new generations of products, services, and business processes. These innovations require seamless collaboration across your firm’s different parts. But in most large corporations, innovation and integration are unnatural acts. Resistance stifles new ideas, and silos block cross-functional cooperation.

[...] explore how some companies are overcoming these boundaries [...] establishing two new types of cross-organizational teams:

- Distributed innovation groups (DIGs) – foster innovation throughout the company.
For example, they deploy intranet based forums and wikis to scout for promising ideas.

- Enterprise integration groups (EIGs) – establish the architecture and management practices essential for business integration. For instance, they identify
integration opportunities, channel resources to them, and reconfigure Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to support ever-tighter crossbusiness collaboration.

To establish each of these groups, select a small number of talented people who combine broad business knowledge, technology expertise, and the social skills needed to build relationships both within and outside your company.

Yes, establishing tools and protocols is only the start. People and their skills (that includes leadership, being trustworthy and good at team building) are essential, especially when dealing with innovative tasks. And it’s more challenging when dealing with scattered (or even rivaling) business units.

So I liked the sound strategic thinking Oliver added – namely what separates the successful collaborative enterprise from those that aren’t – even more as he pointed out usage arenas like business intelligence, internal and external environmental scanning. These are memes worth expanding upon: one of the often overlooked benefits of Enterprise Social Software like wikis is that it both puts real time information to the front-lines of a corporation and collects the wisdom that is spread at the “edges” of the company:

[...] DIG’s could include, as examples, scouting for new ideas and untapped potential in current technologies, scanning the external environment for emerging technologies, Facilitating participation in idea forums, acting as an innovation expertise center, serving as an incubator for promising innovations and publicizing promising innovations and funds.

and

[...] why there are so many sparsely populated wikis and blogs slowly twisting in the wind in the corporate world – because they were set up as tentative trial balloons with no clear utility or guidelines for expected use. It’s trivial to set up a blog or a wiki from a technical perspective – you could do it in the time it took to read this article – setting up the internal use case to ’scout for promising ideas’, for example, takes a great deal more thought and planning.

The real challenge is in finding the key people [...] these are the core resources that will drive innovation, adoption of associated methodologies and their enabling technologies and the successful execution of usage models.

People issues again, but it also reminded me of this (old) article by Rob Cross, Andrew Hargadon et al. (“Together We Innovate“) on the MIT Sloan Management website (and it isn’t about scouting for ideas inside the organization alone, right). It claims “How can companies come up with new ideas? By getting employees working with one another”,

[...] problems that stifle innovation. They share a couple of common themes: the failure to effectively leverage the expertise of employees (or their peers in partner organizations) and the failure to react effectively when new ideas do arise. But we’ve also found five steps companies can take to clear those barriers and start producing big ideas.

Cross, Hargadon et al. collect some network problems (and wrangle some ideas on how to solve them too):

1. No Communication [...] the structure of the company keeps people apart [...]
2. Bad Gatekeepers [...]
3. Insularity [...]

Check out the proposed “solution takes” – and see that these are about people and leadership in the beginning but include as well adaptivity & agility, connectivity and emergence (well, they don’t name it but it’s shinig all through, like when arguing that we need systems that allow for easy collaboration, in my book that means systems that can be personalized and tweaked to my very own needs).

“The social system is an organization, like the individual, that is bound together by a system of communication.” − Norbert Wiener (1948, p. 24)

The paper asks which groups are most likely to communicate with others in a large organization, regardless of social-and physical-boundaries and finds that category-spanning communication patterns are demonstrated primarily by women, mid- to high-level executives, and members of the executive management, sales and marketing functions.

It is available for free download as a pdf. Here’s the abstract:

This is a descriptive study of the structure of communications in a modern organization. We analyze a dataset with millions of electronic mail messages, calendar meetings and teleconferences for many thousands of employees of a single, multidivisional firm during a three-month period in calendar 2006. The basic question we explore asks, what is the role of observable (to us) boundaries between individuals in structuring communications inside the firm? We measure three general types of boundaries: organizational boundaries (strategic business unit and function memberships), spatial boundaries (office locations and inter-office distances), and social categories (gender, tenure within the firm). In dyad-level models of the probability that pairs of individuals communicate, we find very large effects of formal organization structure and spatial collocation on the rate of communication. Homophily effects based on sociodemographic categories are much weaker. In individual-level regressions of engagement in category-spanning communication patterns, we find that women, mid- to high-level executives, and members of the executive management, sales and marketing functions are most likely to participate in cross-group communications. In effect, these individuals bridge the lacunae between distant groups in the company’s social structure.

I like the approach, and the systematization of the three types of boundaries. Moreover the results reminded me of McAfee’s empty quarter thoughts, esp. if we understand that building bridges is one thing that may emerge with the adoption of social software in the enterprise. Yes, to achieve the boundaryless organization, putting social web elements to use is a good idea – especially to support lateral, cross-division, cross-function and cross-rank communication patterns. Yet, I guess that breaking up the silos all the way, i.e. to achieve and leverage “cross-division, cross-function and cross-rank” cooperation and collaboration, will be a lot harder. Connectbeam‘s Hutch Carpenter highlights the status quo and the real issues to deal with, i.e. integrating the user experience and adding layers that do more than mere enterprise search:

Adding social computing features to existing enterprise silos certainly helps, but fails to connect the larger organization. [...]

We have not yet seen the emergence of a full-suite vendor that addresses the different needs of the market. Expect to see enterprises with multiple social computing apps for the foreseeable future.

James also put up a presentation with a “wish list” for enterprise RSS:

These 10 things are inspired by the RSS services and functionality I’ve seen or experienced on the “consumer Web” that I want to have available inside the firewall too. Hopefully it also goes someway to explaining why Enterprise RSS is a different proposition from simply installing an RSS Reader on your work PC and RSS-ifying your intranet.

Yes, these are traits that are overlooked sometimes. Small wonder too – as enterprise RSS is only beginning to take up, some of these points are just emerging (like mobile access) or are seen primarily as job of the IT department (like security).

[...] younger [people] tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

Bertrands point of view adds to this a twist on intraorganizational provision of information, the you know “what’s needed, at the right point in time to the right people and so on”, arguing both that finding, extracting, evaluating, and making efficient use of information demands new competencies and that

[...] The problem is not the mass of infomation, it’s the amount of relevant information (what I need to know to do my job now) in relation to the global quantity.

[while] the information I receive through RSS feeds because I wanted to follow it, because it comes from well-targeted search agents, because it’s filtered by my network, is enormous in quantity but provides me with real benefits. It takes time for me to manage it ? It saves many people’s time in my company when I publish things and bookmarks on our intranet, or on the internet when I publish my bookmarks.

- people is the thing that doesn’t change – it depends on your structures, on the ways work is organized, the choreography, the inner workings etc.
- we need to think simultaneously about technologies *and* organizations, these are intertwined, no thing like Ceteris Paribus here (it’s ans AND BOTH world)
- Jenny had some concerns with the Davenport/McAfee debate, like that it omits discussion about value creation principles – again people and the structures they’re working in

Some remarks on Enterprise 2.0 SLATES, then she’s looking at Organizational Network Analysis, referring to Valdis Krebs, Rob Cross, Patti Anklam and Nancy White (crazy, I follow these people too on a regular basis). Mentions the Dunbar number, Metcalfe’s law etc.

SNA reveals informal networks, which thrive in parallel to the formal, visible structure. Yes, this allows for completely different perspectives on the social world inside organizations, on influence groups, leverage points and patterns of interaction.

Jenny offers some more insights on the importance of choosing metrics right, like when measuring only the activity of wiki edits doesn’t really provide insight – you have to look behind the history of these edits, the changing alliances in the argument, etc.

To wrap it up, this is messy, complex stuff, the most interesting things are happening in the spaces in between. The notion of network thinking is a demanding discipline, perhaps one reason that able organizational development consultants are rare in this space, yet enhancing or leveraging social capital in the enterprise is a hugely important task.

This has been one of my highlights for the conference, sadly I have been bugged in between by annoying internet connection problems, so this writeup is rather sparse. Anyway, I will exchange some words with Jenny later on, there’s a get-together scheduled at the end of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit, some beers are definitely doomed …

I hold that most of the outlined specific industry needs could also be handled with project wikis. After all architects are knowledge workers too, who need adaptive platforms for succeeding in their job (and projects), who work in closely interconnected networks of specialists, who need to stay in touch with their customers and more.

While discussing UI, usability, user-friendliness and all is interesting (though putting lipstick on a pig really doesn’t help much) – well, even the endless arguments of “industrial-strength-software proponents” are entertaining in a way because we know better (this is dire stuff, and I ask myself if those guys ever worked with enterprise-style-software like R/3) – I want to chip in some observations from another perspective.

As a long-time enterprise software user, developer (yes, I was – years ago in my old life) and today enterprise 2.0 & enterprise social software consultant, I want to offer look at this from a position of wiki advocate (-evangelist, if you want).

Are enterprise wikis sexy? Most people don’t think so – but I think they get it wrong: Enterprise wikis are interesting not because of their advanced technology, their polished user interface or their neat mark-up language – in fact these are kind of disadvantages most of the time when we want corporate adoption to take off. Like when people doubt whether the wiki markup language will be accepted in their companies – they sure don’t deem wiki markup sexy. Yes, these are no shiny tools, they don’t offer eye candy, but they are well suited for doing their job.

The key is to start from business applications and needs – not tools. If the starting point is a specific business application like e.g. project management or business development support, users will judge the sexyness of the application in a different way – they will look for personal use and business value primarily.

Wikis soon gain “cool tools status” – just because they offer room for flexible emergent uses, coupled with great simplicity. In this light Dave Snowden opens a can of worms, which should attract more discussing, when he’s pointing to the inherent differences between complex social software and standard enterprise ware.

So yes, wikis can even be fun to use, and while sexyness is always a matter of taste, this is a good start and adds to the other wiki benefits like scalabity, connectivity and cost effectiveness that stand on their own anyway. This is no “fantasy land”, this is today, the 21st century and the changes will be great, and they won’t be about technology or tools:

Enterprise 2.0 is already upon us, providing us attractive, usable, reliable and secure applications. We just haven’t made the move to adopting it. But it’s happening now, with Generation M, mobile, multimedia, multitasking and here. Now.

Yahoo! Pipes is a neat way for fast prototyping, and to pull together little applications, filters and stuff. One example is my little pipe “Un-del.icio.us frogpond RSS feed“, that cleans up the original RSS feed of this site, i.e. that excludes the del.icio.us links from the feed, and provides only my generic posts. I needed this for my BMID-sidebar, where I wanted to include the last ten frogpond-posts but had no need for these “standard del.icio.us-Links for the day” posts. With pipes I managed to build this little helper in practically no time …

Some good information on pipes is here “Learn How to Build a Pipe in Just a Few Minutes“, and have a look at my pipes posts on the BMID-blog.

Some observations from a strategic / business point of view:

• Google is proposing an open approach with the goal of integrating a variety of networks – they are not building up yet another social network. This is a platform approach, not a product or services innovation.
• And this is also a cool business model innovation move – Google is opening up the social networking space to the many developers outside with a standard platform, i.e. they have learned the Facebook lesson and expanded on it – turning the table for Facebook in effect. Now who’s leading the charge in the web OS game …
• Google understands that there’s more value to be gained from a shared ecosystem and from the long tail of distributed communities, than from a walled garden even if it’s big. There’s no need for an one and for all über-network, but for an easy way to integrate the many existing social networking sites (and communities of people in fact).

Nice before/after picture:

Some snippets (via Richard MacManus, …):

OpenSocial is not a social network itself, rather it is a set of three common APIs that allow developers to access the following core functions and information at social networks:

* Profile Information (user data)
* Friends Information (social graph)
* Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

For developers there are lots of benefits. They can build an app that easily works across all the OpenSocial partners. And they can use normal HTML, Javascript and Flash – instead of the proprietary languages Facebook forces developers to use.

You may also check out the Google guys view on all this, here at the all new OpenSocial API blog (“The web is better when it’s social“)

Then, for those with more time on their hands there’s also this one-hour explanatory video:

And here’s a little video by Marc Andreesen of Ning explaining the concept of container and apps:

Interested in more analyses? Go visit Techmeme and bring lots of time. Or take my short list of cool posts, starting with Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester (“Explaining OpenSocial to your Executives”), this is a good short status report, short excerpt:

What is Open Social?

Google says: “OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.”

Translation: Social Networks, and other websites (we can call them platforms or containers) can let mini-websites (applications or widgets) to be shared and interact with existing online communities (social networks, social graphs, communities).

Jeremiah also expands on the opportunities this offers, namely in the community building space (Efficient development, harness existing communities, open standards help long term, your existing applications become social, future brings social to your website). Recommended analysis, gets you up to speed quick.

Then there’s Anil Dash of Six Apart (“OpenSocial, Killer Apps and Regular People”), on why the opened social graph can help people in their networked lifes:

This gives regular people on the web more control over the social networks and applications they use.

Interesting times ahead.

Warum sind Wikipedia, Craigslist und Skype so erfolgreich? Wieso versetzten Kazaa und Napster der Musikindustrie einen solchen Schlag?

Weil sie das freche Seestern-Prinzip nutzen, das auf Dezentralisierung, Vertrauen und Kommunikation unter Gleichen aufbaut. Mit ihrer Wandlungsfähigkeit setzen die flinken Seesterne die hierarchischen Spinnenorganisationen immer wieder Schachmatt – und verändern damit die Welt.

Rod is an interesting guy:

[...] Stanford-Absolvent und Unternehmer, der sein erstes Unternehmen CATS Software Inc. an die NASDAQ brachte und u.a. auch ein früher Investor bei eBay war. Er engagiert sich für Umweltthemen und soziale Belange und half etwa bei der Gründung des Silicon Valley Social Venture Funds und des Environmental Markets Network. Zur Zeit verfolgt Rod mit der Firma twiki.net die Entwicklung von Wikis als open-source enterprise software.

Some reviews of his book, via newthinking store and my del.icio.us bookmarks:

Handelsblatt (german)
Welt (german)
Firstmedia (german)

Some english reviews: David Robertson and Harold Jarche, and here are some distilled book notes at the Socialtext Open Wiki – i.e. “main content of the book, but without the stories and examples”.

There’s less to Facebook and other social networks than meets the eye
[...] the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities on the internet to replicate the millions that exist offline. No single company, therefore, can capture the social graph

This article also holds some learnings for the design of social network infrastructure in the enterprise, but the one above is central in my mind: You better start with the individual knowledge worker that is embedded in small communities of practice – and provide the means for a range of networks, organizational settings and “blended arrangements”, i.e. allowing for diverse mixtures of real-life and virtual networking.

After all, this is what McAfee’s SLATES concept calls for – emergent, freeform collaboration, i.e. letting the communities and networks evolve and emerge from the factual interactions and work practices.

And yes, the importance of small networks and platforms to support them could also be discussed from a business model innovation perspective, well at least for “people who are interested in how Social Networks will play out“, especially in the NGO- and nonprofit-space (more on the upcoming NGO-BarCamp).

Social Networks and Organizational Pathologies …

What’s the attraction in Facebook?

Make innovation a truly open and collaborative process

Marketinginstrument Community – Wie können Marken den Nutzer beeinflussen?

Portable soziale Netzwerke

Noserub @ Barcamp München Tag 2

MIT Sloan Business Insight, with a link to an interesting article (How can companies build organizational networks that encourage innovation?)

Jumpstarting innovation (and how to leverage collaboration …)

Technology, Innovation and Organization (for complex organizational settings)

Leitfaden zum Thema Web 2.0 & E-Commerce

The Impact of Web 2.0 and Emerging Social Network Models

Designing for Flexibility