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Traditional definitions often define collaboration as a team who coordinates their efforts in order to achieve a known objective. Social collaboration, on the other hand, is about collaboration in a broader sense. It is about people collaborating as an enterprise and contributing to a shared purpose by directly and indirectly helping each other achieve goals.
Whether we are having a conversation that clarifies a certain issue on a blog, updating information on a community wiki or answering a question on a micro-blogging platform, we are in fact collaborating. Although this kind of collaboration is often indirect and quite subtle, our contributions can help individuals, teams or the entire enterprise deal with major challenges.
There are many use cases for social collaboration — coauthoring content, using a wiki or collecting feedback via a blog, to name a few. In this article however, I will focus on some of the more indirect effects of social collaboration and how those can help improve key knowledge worker activities such as sharing and finding information, finding people and locating expertise, and creating and maintaining workspace awareness.
We need to start sharing and turning content into social objects.
The Social Object
The concept of social objects is central to social collaboration. A social object is a shared digital resource that can be used for sharing information or experiences about something, creating new information, coordinating activities and so on.
People can interact with a social object in various ways such as commenting, tagging or rating. By doing so, they also leave their digital fingerprints on the object. Fingerprints can tell us what they did, when they did it, which people they have interacted with and in what context. It can also help to reveal patterns of how work actually gets done, where certain information exists, who has a certain expertise, how information relates to other information, which people share common interest, who influences whom and who is likely to be able to answer certain kinds of questions.
This information can then be used to make it easier to find information, people and expertise, as well as increase workspace awareness, both of which are important for effective and efficient collaboration and decision making.
Sharing Information
Timely access to information is critical in making the right decisions and taking the right actions to create business value. Unfortunately, a lot of information is created and kept in information silos, inaccessible to many of the people who may need it. The key to unlocking information silos is to make people share the information they encounter with each other. Interactions are the pipes in which information flows and we are the pipe connectors.
The same principles that make information flow on the social web can be used to make information — and thereby knowledge, ideas and experiences — flow better within enterprises. Easy-to-use social software with mechanisms such as links, feeds, signals, search and tags have all proved to make it easier for information to flow. On the social web, sharing is really easy. If we make sharing as easy as possible, we can improve a lot of the other key knowledge worker activities.
Finding Information
The exponential growth of information within organizations is often seen as problematic. One problem is that it makes it harder to find information, which leads to lower employee productivity or suffering customer service.
To avoid this, we need new and innovative approaches that help us define meaningful filters and allow relevant information to find us, sometimes before we even know we need it or are aware that it exists. The classic approach to avoid suffering findability is to remove information that isn’t that important. But this is simply not an option anymore, since we never know if or when we might need a certain piece of information, or what value it will have to us if and when we need it.
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