Enterprise Collaboration: Guidance From the Experts

Another week of expert advice on collaboration has passed us by. This time our little helpers focused on crowdsourcing, as well as disrupting everything we thought we knew was true about adoption. Here's a quick recap: 

• Collaboration – an Intranet Perspective. Collaboration applications never seem to need a business case, other than a senior manager deciding that there is poor collaboration in the organisation and that the problem can be solved with bringing in some new technology. However there is usually never any analysis of whether or not there is a systemic problem with collaborative working. Achieving effective collaboration requires a series of precursor actions to have been accomplished, in all of which the intranet plays a critical role in their execution.
• Crowdsourcing and the Next Wave of Collaboration. Crowdsourcing innovation is primarily about collaboration, and to better understand the drivers and practices behind it. 
• Crowdsourcing and the Next Wave of Collaboration, Part 2. In part one of Crowdsourcing and the Next Wave of Collaboration, we talked about the definition of crowdsourcing innovation, and its problems and successes. In part 2, we take a look at the maturity of both the practice and technology, as well where survey respondents were in their deployment of these solutions.
• The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer. Enterprise intranets are usually created to act as the main conduits for internal collaboration, including content creation / acquisition. But, to-date, most are failing to engage their internal customers: the employees of corporations. To improve intranets to act as effective “gateways” for collaboration, intranets would likely benefit from many capabilities incorporated into Web Experience Management (WEM) for external-facing websites, including the use of social apps. In this case, a company’s employees are the customers to be engaged and converted.
• Three Types of Collaboration that Drive Innovation. A company that strives to be innovative must be collaborative. But not all collaboration is the same. What about collaboration in the service of innovation? What are the ways collaboration helps employees, and organizations as a whole, advance their ideas and create impactful innovations?
• Six Counterintuitive Truths About Enterprise 2.0 Adoption. Ten years of knowledge sharing deployments convince me that the rules are different for E2.0. Transactional system benchmarks just don’t work, but we keep applying them to collaborative situations anyway. When you think about it, it doesn’t make sense. Consider the “truths” for traditional back-office deployments: get everything right before you go live. Mandate a cutover date and turn off the old system. Calculate ROI by increases or decreases in anything tangible — widgets, hours, paperwork. None of that stuff applies to E2.0 environments. In my experience, six counterintuitive principles work better.