Enterprise 2.0: Oracle’s Initiatives for Enterprise 2.0

Steve Diamond, an Oracle product manager for on-demand CRM, led a breakout session on their Enterprise 2.0 initiatives. I’m attending a dinner tonight with Oracle executives tonight and will undoubtedly hear more about this.

After 30+ minutes of lightweight “here’s what Enterprise 2.0 is and why it’s important”, he finally started to talk about what new and exciting things that they’re doing, but I’d mostly nodded off by then. Guess I will have to pay attention tonight. He did talk about their Social CRM application and about what’s happening in their internal AppsLab skunkworks, but it just wasn’t enough to hold my attention and I slipped out early.

The buzz around here seems to be that Oracle doesn’t have enough of their Enterprise 2.0 story sorted out yet, and I’m still waiting for Oracle to prove that notion wrong.

Enterprise 2.0: IBM’s Social Networking Directions

I had a great opportunity today at lunch for a one-hour session with Jeff Schick, VP of social networking at IBM, and Joan DiMicco who came to IBM after doing media studies at MIT and is one of the key people behind Beehive. There were only seven of us plus these two quite technical IBM’ers in a suite upstairs in the hotel, giving us an opportunity to have an informal roundtable discussion: a sort of social networking nerd heaven.

We started out with a discussion about Beehive — a sort of enterprise Facebook that IBM has developed for internal use — which has gained 33,000 users in less than a year since internal release. That’s 10% of IBM’s workforce, which is a pretty significant adoption rate considering that it’s not required for creating any sort of work product. Beehive is purely a social platform, not a work platform, to allow IBM employees to create social and personal connections. I have friends within IBM, mostly former FileNet people who were absorbed during the acquisition, and one of them speaks glowingly of Beehive as a way to find other people with similar interests to her in order to find people whom with to collaborate.

Schick said that people are starting to be freer with the information that they share on Beehive, and we had a discussion about whether this additional degree of sharing tended to increase the camaraderie amongst co-workers. They’re seeing a blending of personal and professional information published on Beehive, which tends to enrich the communication between people since you have a more multi-faceted view of someone who you’ve met only online. He also talked about adding social concepts to business applications, for example, being able to link directly from someone’s name on a specific business transaction to other information that they have shared, such as shared files or profile information.

Jeffrey Walker of Atlassian was also in attendance, and he asked about the issue of having multiple social networks and how he really just wants a filtered version of Facebook for the enterprise, not yet another social platform. DiMicco responded that people who do external social networking in addition to Beehive tend to create very different profiles in, for example, Facebook and Beehive: they might post photos of their kids within Beehive but not in an open Facebook photo album. In other words, they use Beehive and other social networks for different reasons. Schick added that you can have links to your other social network profiles on your Beehive profile, so if you already have a lot set up elsewhere, you can link to it rather that replicate it, but that (in my opinion) devalues it somewhat since you don’t have federated searching across all of someone’s profiles if they choose to keep only a minimum in Beehive. Later, we heard about Fringe, a sort of internal FriendFeed to aggregate all of the internal and external information sources to provide some level of federated search, which does ease some of those concerns.

The interesting thing about IBM and Enterprise 2.0 is that IBM definitely eats their own dogfood; in fact, they eat it long before they consider serving it up to their customers. A few years ago, I heard about IBM’s Dogear (a social bookmarking tool, like Del.icio.us for the enterprise) at a Toronto-based Enterprise Camp; at the time, I tried to dig around and figure out when it would become available as a product, but they used it extensively internally before finally productizing it. Similarly, there are plans to productize Beehive and Fringe as behind-the-firewall social applications for enterprises under the Lotus Connections brand, now that they’ve had a chance to polish off the rough edges through their own internal use. These aren’t just for big enterprises: some smaller companies are using them as well.

The interesting opportunity is that IBM puts a stamp of credibility on the whole social networking space by offering applications to enterprises, which will undoubtedly benefit other social application vendors as the tide rises. They also see (rightly) that their social technology is far ahead of Microsoft’s, although it is being positioned against SharePoint in some cases. Schick sees content management as a key part of collaboration, and integration between the Lotus Connections products and ECM platforms such as FileNet, Documentum and SharePoint will allow them to make that even stronger.

Enterprise 2.0: Ross Mayfield on Elevating the Enterprise 2.0 Conversation

Ross Mayfield of Socialtext gave the last keynote of the morning, discussing the evolution of wiki usage in enterprises. Many enterprise systems started out being about automating the business processes, and we ended up with file-centric paradigms of collaboration and rigid document management practices. Wikis, on the other hand, allowed for less rigid collaboration, although it started with a primarily technical user base. Since the introduction of wikis in enterprise environments, the use cases have evolved:

  • 2002: techies for project communication
  • 2004: business user alternative to email
  • 2006: internal Wikipedia
  • 2008: process-specific solutions

The real advantage comes when the wikis moves from being “above the flow”, where it stores the artifacts of a business process, to being “in the flow”, that is, an inherent part of the business process. The goal is not to automate the business processes to drive down costs, but to support groups to collaborate on exceptions on processes. In order to do this, enterprise processes, have to be redesigned with transparency and participation capabilities; I’m seeing this from many of the BPM vendors that allow for spontaneous and ad hoc collaboration at any point in the process where the participant feels the need.

Mayfield also used the keynote as an opportunity to talk about their latest product, SocialCalc, a social spreadsheet created in conjunction with Dan Bricklin (the creator of the original VisiCalc spreadsheet, who has lately been dabbling in the concepts of wiki spreadsheets). It looks like this provides the same functionality as Google Docs spreadsheets, but in an on-premise solution behind the firewall, in case you didn’t buy into the Google cloud message this morning.

Enterprise 2.0: AIIM’s State of the Industry Study

Dan Keldsen and Carl Frappaolo of AIIM gave a quick review of the recent AIIM study on Enterprise 2.0. Their first finding: age doesn’t really matter, culture does. Finally, someone else who sees this: I’m so tired of the view from people my age who make it an age issue when really the issue is that they’re not adaptive to the Web 2.0 culture. I also liked that the study classified me as “gen X” rather than “boomer”.

Other than that, I found the talk a bit content-free, but there’s not a lot that you can do in 10 minutes.

Enterprise 2.0: How Cloud Computing is Shaping Enterprise Technology

The Enterprise 2.0 conference kicked off yesterday with some workshops, but I just flew in this morning and am at my first session of the day (although not *the* first session of the day), a keynote by Google’s Rishi Chandra on cloud computing. The same key message (buy lots of Google cloud computing 🙂 ) but some complementary points to the presentation that I saw by Matthew Glotzbach at IT360 a couple of months ago; considering that they’re both in product marketing for Google Enterprise, that’s not surprising.

The focus of the presentation is cloud computing, and how the trends in consumer applications are starting to bleed over into the enterprise world. Chandra discussed several trends in cloud computing for the enterprise:

  1. Simplicity wins, and applications that provide targeted functionality well are more likely to succeed than monolithic all-singing, all-dancing applications.
  2. Rise of the power collaborator, as the important things being done in many organizations shift from being individual efforts to team efforts. A key team member will be the well-connected collaborators who can leverage the skills of others to help the entire team to succeed.
  3. Economics of IT are changing, and many companies are looking at combinations of on-premise software and software as a service.
  4. Barriers to the adoption of cloud computing for the enterprise are falling away: connectivity, user experience, reliability, offline access and security are all valid issues, but are all being addressed. He made some great points here (with which I totally agree) about the illusion of security of your existing internal systems, and how better security be achieved by putting corporate data in the cloud for remote access instead of having it on an unsecured laptop that can be stolen. You already trust a variety of outsourced vendors with your data — payroll, legal, IT — so how is outsourcing your data and application infrastructure any different? In fact, it used to be quite common (in the days when everyone had a mainframe) for third parties such as IBM and many long-dead competitors to host many companies’ data centers.

I’m totally on with cloud computing: my email is hosted on Google Apps, and I backup daily to an encrypted Amazon S3 service. Although I would not be keen to have my laptop stolen, I had a moment a couple of days ago when my laptop spontaneously died, and I felt absolutely no panic about it. It turned out to be only a temporary coma, but I knew that I could recreate my working environment on a new machine in pretty short order.

By the way, yes, there’s free wifi.

LongJump

I really hate going through a lengthy interview about a hot new product, only to have them tell me at the end that half of what they told me is off the record. Not embargoed until some near-future announcement date, just off the record. Grrr.

Other than that, I had a pretty good demo last week from Pankaj Malviya, CEO of LongJump, who I missed at last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. LongJump is the brand for a service provided by Relationals, which has been in business since 2003 with a hosted CRM plaform targetted at media companies. Bonus marks to Pankaj, who starts into the presentation saying that their target users are business managers who organize information and create workflow, then in an aside, says “I see that you’re a business process management expert”, which means that either he’s looked at my blog or his PR person has briefed him well. 🙂

All of their solutions, including both those with the Relationals brand and the new LongJump hosted solutions, are focussed on the small to medium business market. LongJump, in fact, is created on the same underlying platform as the Relationals CRM, including components such as the MySQL database.

LongJump is a platform for creating data-driven, widget-based web applications, as well as offering a shared catalog environment for offering those applications by subscription to other users, including monetization of the applications. The application assembly environment is similar to an iGoogle home page, or other similar portal environments: widgets can be placed on the page, although they can’t exchange data or do other data mashup/filtering functionality like Yahoo Pipes. They have their own widget format, but it’s similar to the Google widget format and they’re working on making it identical so that widget created for Google could be used in LongJump.

LongJump Asset Tracking demo

The demo application was an asset tracking application, and I didn’t see much difference from the seemly endless array of lightweight web-based application development environments until he started showing me how to apply workflow to objects. There’s no graphical process mapper, but you can set states through which an object must pass and the predefined responses at each of those states, which in turn creates a sequence of tasks assigned to specific people or roles. The workflows can be triggered by data events, such as “renewal date less than 30 days”. This is crude from a BPM standpoint — it reminds me a lot of what IBM had in their Content Manager application a couple of years ago to do simple object-based workflow routing — but I haven’t seen anything else like it in this space. They plan to enhance this capability further, and I think that they could have a real competitive differentiator here.

Each application is “packaged” for publication on their catalog; for example, the Asset Tracking application above consists of all of the tabs that you see along the top (Home, Directory, PCs and Servers, Phones, Equipment, Reports, About), where each of those tabs has its own set of widgets and the underlying data sources. The catalog then makes published applications available for subscription by others, and handles the monetization.

LongJump is in an early (closed) beta now, with an open beta expected by end of year — I find this a longish timeline for this sort of application, but it’s coming from a more traditional company so I expect that their internal test and release procedures are different from the usual hair-on-fire Web 2.0 startup. They received 1,800 applicants for the closed beta, and have about 10 customers on there now.

Enterprise 2.0: Zoho

I had a chance for a one-on-one chat and demo with Raju Vegesna, Zoho‘s evangelist, while at Enterprise 2.0 this week; since I do face-to-face interviews with a paper notebook, however, it’s taken me until the flight home from Boston to find time to transcribe my notes.

I’ve played around with Zoho, Google Apps and a few other Office 2.0 applications, but find it hard to find the compelling argument for me to start using them: I’m often in places with flaky, expensive or non-existent wifi, and it just doesn’t make sense to have my productivity impacted by the inability to connect to the internet. Case in point, I’m at 35,000’ right now, writing this blog post in Windows Live Writer, not in the Movable Type online environment where the blog is actually domiciled.

A few new releases in Zoho, however, have me willing to try it out: Zoho Wiki and Zoho Meeting. I’ve used another free hosted wiki, PBwiki, but they’ve only just introduced WYSIWYG editing and it still feels a bit kludgy; I could use MediaWiki on my own hosting platform, but they don’t have WYSIWYG editing at all, and I think that’s a major barrier to adoption. So seeing Zoho Wiki, which uses Zoho Writer (the word processor) as the text editor, makes me want to give that a try instead. It also has some nice capabilities for direct integration with some of the other Zoho tools that I want to test out.

The big news this week is Zoho Meeting, and that’s what Raju and I spent most of our time on. Currently free, although I’m expecting some sort of monetization model in the future, this is an online meeting and desktop sharing application, like Webex. It requires the meeting host to used a downloaded Windows application, but the attendees can either use a (Windows-only) ActiveX control, or a Java or Flash plug-in on other operating systems. There’s a high degree of integration with other applications: you can launch a Zoho meeting from a Skype chat, or embed it into a page of a presentation on Zoho Show if you only need to hop into full desktop sharing mode for part of a presentation. The meeting session is downloadable afterwards as a Flash file for replay, and can be used to generate a discussion forum thread with the meeting archive linked in. And, like Webex and other desktop sharing applications, it can also be used for remote control of a Windows PC: you leave the host running on the computer to be controlled (say, your home computer), then enter the meeting from another computer and (presumabely password protected) take control of the host computer.

I also saw Zoho Notebook, a free-form authoring application similar to Microsoft OneNote (but hosted), where you can add pages in a sort of binder/notebook paradigm, then put any type of content on the pages. There’s version control on the objects, and read-only and read/write security can be applied at the paragraph level for sharing.

Zoho Creator was interesting, too: a forms-based database application development environment, similar to a number of others ones that I’ve seen like DabbleDB. You create an application by drawing the associate user interface form, which in turn generates the database required for the fields on the form. You can edit the script behind each form object to change the default behaviours and add more functionality. The data can be viewed in the form or in a table view. Multiple database tables with joins are supported, and data can be imported and exported from the tables.

There’s also a QuickRead browser plug-in for IE or Firefox that acts as a viewer for many different office document types, insteach of having to launch the behemoth MS-Office application just to view a document that’s linked on a website. The browsers handle a lot of the document types natively, but QuickRead seems to handle many more that aren’t supported by the browsers themselves.

Also in the category of fun things to do with MS-Office documents, there’s a WebDAV sort of plug-in for MS-Office applications to allow the documents authored in those environments to be replicated online, which provides an easy transition path for Office users who want to get started on Zoho.

The last thing that we looked at was Zoho Mail; I’m not sure that Raju intended to show me that, but I saw it on his screen when he was getting set up for the demo, and it piqued my interest. It’s still in closed beta with 20-30,000 users, getting ready for general release in a couple of months. By providing some really slick interlinking of content types between Mail and the other Zoho applications, and a much more MS-Outlook style of interface (including the ability to see all attachments to all messages as a sort of document store), they’re looking to add value over what Google Mail provides. I suppose if you can’t be bought by them, then you have to try and beat them.

Enterprise 2.0: Town Hall wrapup

The conference finished with a general “town hall” session with Jessica Lipnack of NetAge and Stowe Boyd of Blue Whale Labs. I had thought that there was too much preaching to the converted going on here, but I sat with Eric Hoffert of ShareMethods during the session and as a vendor, he’s talked with a lot of customers here and saw many who are just getting started or looking at how to start. I stand corrected. 🙂

They redid the same survey (by SMS) as to whether the attendees felt that incumbent enterprise applications would add on Web 2.0 functionality and remain dominant in that area, or whether new Web 2.0 applications would take precedence; Web 2.0 went from 55% to 75% of the vote since the original vote during the Tuesday keynote. The IT versus user control question saw user control gain in popularity from 77% to 85%, and in the hype versus reality showdown, reality went from 69% to 89% popularity.

Boyd saw that the enterprise people attending are eager to adopt the best of Web 2.0, but still maintain the things that work for them from the older technology; unfortunately, they’re having difficulty figuring out which is which, and which is likely to be valuable in the future. The enterprise software vendors, on the other hand, are very clear about the fact that not only do they have the answers, but they’re going to make the decisions for you. He feels that the Enterprise 2.0 moniker is being misapplied in many cases: that it is really radically different, and that many of the vendors (especially the older enterprise software vendors who are positioning Web 2.0 as “old wine in new bottles”) just don’t get it yet. He gives no passing grades to any of the parties involved (watch McAfee’s keynote to see what he’s grading), except to give the users a B- for effort. There’s a lot of things going on, but not a lot of understanding of how to apply those in a practical fashion.

I had to duck out a few minutes early to catch my flight, in the middle of audience members telling about their “veil lifting from the eyes” revelation during the conference:

  • Allow the users to define what they need (“if they come, we will build it”), rather than having IT decide (“if we build it, they will come”)
  • The value of folksonomies over taxonomies
  • Software-as-a-service on the way to becoming a utility rather than being considered a business risk
  • The blogosphere is an incredible source of information, both about the authors and the content

Enterprise 2.0: Thomas Vander Wal

The last breakout session was with Thomas Vander Wal of InfoCloud, talking about tagging in the enterprise. He started out defining tagging and its uses: simple data/metadata externally applied to an object, which is used for sorting and as a hook for aggregating; tags provide an identifier or description of an item, or are a personal marker. He then looked at how the shift occurs from a top-down taxonomy to a bottom-up folksonomy: the result of personal free tagging by the consumer of the data, using their own vocabulary and viewpoint, for their own retrieval, but shared so others can use it. This is not so much a matter of people categorizing in a taxonomic sense, but in finding ways to connect information.

As I saw demonstrated at a recent conference, all of this makes librarians and taxonomists nervous, because they think of this as a specialized science that only they can do, and that the little people will just screw this up if you let them do it themselves.

Vander Wal showed how del.icio.us extended the tagging basics of object and metadata to include identity: you can track the tags of people whose opinions that you value. By looking at the object-metadata-identity relationship, you can now see, for example, what other people tagged with the same tags that you use in order to find new information that may be relevant.

He then moved on to what happens when you add community into the mix, which tends to apply some structure to the metadata because of the common vocabulary and understanding within the community or enterprise. He sees taxonomy as more more likely to be driven internally by a company, whereas a folksonomy is driven by the customer: folksonomy is emergent and fluid.

He discussed the business tensions between taxonomy and folksonomy in the enterprise: the balance between naming control and people’s vocabulary; using sample groups versus allowing every perspective to contribute; create in-house versus an outside service; the high cost of developing a taxonomy for a pre-determined value versus a low-cost taxonomy with an unknown value; consistency versus the emergent. In general, organizations spend a lot less money on their intranet than their customer-facing sites so it’s usually harder to find things; adding tagging to an intranet can hugely add value by allowing people to find information on the intranet. There’s also opportunities for business-to-business tagging, which can be used to align the vocabulary between two companies, and for customers to use tagging on an enterprise’s community-facing sites.

For an enterprise’s external sites, tagging can provide an improved understanding of the customers and market by looking at what terms that people are using to tag certain objects and pages — this could be an incredibly powerful yet inexpensive market research tool. It allows an organization to capture all of the current terminology around their products and usage to more easily target messaging around the products, and even develop market segmentation. In general, it provides a much better perspective on the customer base, or at least that portion of it that tags.

For an intranet, tagging can help improve findability and improve the context in which pages are understood. It allows for easy sharing of resources, and a cost-effective method of building a taxonomy so that vocabulary becomes shared across silos for disambiguation within the corporation.

In order to do all this, there needs to be some monitoring and analysis tools: what tags are being used, inbound and outbound traffic levels, if spam is occurring, and what’s happening in external tagging sites as well as any internal tagging systems. Analysis of all this allows you to look at usage patterns, build synonym repositories, identify people with common interests, and build some order and structure.

As tagging scales up in an enterprise, it always starts for reasons of personal productivity, then moves on to the serendipity of finding things with related tags, then a more mature social tagging where people are more aware of what’s happening in their community, and finally becomes a complex social system. I find interesting analogies to how my usage of del.icio.us has changed over time: I started using it just to get control of my browser bookmarks, and eventually moved on to using it to auto-generate daily blog posts of the new pages that I tag, along with my comments on each link.

Vander Wal walks us through the phases of interaction — this guy talks at light-speed, and I’m completely unable to capture all of this, which is unfortunate since it’s really, really interesting — and discusses the viral nature of it, especially within enterprises where the value of shared tags is usually much more obvious than in the wild.

He looks at the reasons that people tag, which are primarily for their own use and for re-findability. He touches on the social aspects of tagging, such as the categories that I use for posts on this blog, or tags that I add to my friends’ Flickr photos if I can add value with my unique metadata. There’s always issues of privacy, and in fact, del.icio.us now allows for private tagging in addition to publicly-visible tags, although many social networking sites don’t provide any privacy around the tags that you add to objects. Ma.gnolia, another social bookmarking site, also allows for private groups to be created, which is a great way for enterprises to get started with tagging without having to bring it in-house, but still providing privacy of those tags to just the group.The concepts of tagging are moving into many other areas, such as Microsoft Vista now allowing tagging of files.

There’s some interesting clustering that can be done with tagging as well, looking at the common co-occurrences of tags, which Flickr is doing now so that you can look at a group of photos that have common tags that are of interest to you.

Vander Wal stated that he doesn’t find tag clouds to be particularly useful for most applications, instead preferring a flat list of tags, but sees that tag clouds can be good for understanding the essence of an object or page.

If you want to see an example of tagging at use to great effect in a consumer retail environment, go find Kevin Federline’s CD on Amazon and check out the tags that customers associated with the product (about halfway down the page): “talentless” floats to the top.

He finished up with some thoughts on interoperability, which I see it going to be an increasingly important issue as the use of tagging proliferates, and multiple platforms are used.

Enterprise 2.0: Group Intelligence Panel

Luis Solis of GroupSystems moderated a panel on Group Intelligence Across the Enterprise: 5 Keys to Success, with David Marshak of the Unified Communications & Collaboration group at IBM, Alex Pentland of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and John Abele of Boston Scientific. One interesting thing was that Solis invited us to SMS him with questions during the presentation; not sure that that’s all that efficient, but maybe will pull a few of the introverts out of the closet.

Solis stated that personal productivity is (so) yesterday, even though that’s what a lot of this conference seems to have focussed on, and that we need to focus on group intelligence. He feels that collaboration is a too generic concept, and breaks it down into ad hoc (socializing, and 2 peers notifying or discussing) and structured group collaboration (lecturing, and many-to-many exploration/innovation). He sees the many-to-many exploration/innovation is the interesting part of collaboration for enterprises, since that leads to problem-solving, but that it’s hard work because it relies on trust within the group, a supportive culture, and confident leadership. Interestingly, he sees that American culture can be anti-collaborative because of a natural command-and-control mentality, whereas other countries (he mentioned Sweden in particular) have a more inherent bent towards collaboration in their national culture that spills over into their corporate culture. It would be interesting to see where Canada lies on this spectrum.

Pentland spoke about sensor networks, and the management of face-to-face communications. Using an on-body sensor (a sort of smart name tag), they measured who interacted with whom over the course of a project (which happened to be a banking marketing campaign) by detecting proximity as well as who was speaking. Rolling this together with the email traffic that went around for the same project, they were able to look at the total communication model and correlations between face-to-face/email traffic and factors such as the quality of the group interactions; the final result is that face-to-face communication communication is better than email. Okay, we really already knew that, but for the gadget geeks, there’s now a way to actually measure it. Apparently, these smart tags can also measure things such as physical gestures, which can have an impact with things such as animating an avatar in an environment like Second Life.

Marshak discussed IBM’s internal community tools, which I’ve heard about from friends of mine who work at IBM. With more than 300,000 employees, IBM has a few internal communication issues, especially around having people with common interests or complementary skills find each other. Their intranet allows people to join groups that are geographic- or interest-based, then use that to harness the community knowledge. His example was about when he upgraded to a new version of Lotus Notes and his Blackberry no longer worked, and he wanted to find out what to do (I resisted the urge to shout out “Buy Microsoft Outlook”); he pinged the internal Blackberry group and was soon in an interactive text chat with others who either had the same problem or who had a solution. The nice thing is that there’s no anonymity: everyone is accountable for their internal communications, and those involved in the communication can rate responses and even report someone else if they are using that communication method improperly. Even their Second Life group requires that you register your real identity in order to join. There’s an ongoing debate about many social networking sites about using your own identity, and I strongly feel that you should use your own identify if you want to engage in a public conversation, since hiding behind a pseudonym often results in completely inappropriate behaviour (I notice that those who oppose this view are almost always the ones engaging in such behaviour).

Abele discussed methods for creating the right environment for group collaboration, which he sees as requiring diversity (in culture, experience, bias, age, geography), a means of gathering input from everyone, and a means of aggregating information. He discussed impediments to collaboration: silos and different cultures, strong egos, messenger killers, pontificators, group think, off topic time wasters, diverse levels of understanding, a range of bias (although he also listed this as part of the diversity that was required), lack of leadership, and poor organization. Many environments actually reward silo behaviour, which manifests in enterprises and academia as information or skills specializations: the better that you get at a particular specialization, the more you get paid; unfortunately, focus on a specialization usually happens to the detriment of other knowledge and skills.

We ended up with audience questions, which started some interesting discussion threads. Marshak said that he doesn’t think that the goal of online communications should be to emulate face-to-face meetings: it’s just different, and those differences can be leveraged.

They also discussed the problems of group-think that can occur both from cultural/gender biases and when corporate organizational structures are allowed to influence how people interact, and how anonymity can be useful in some cases to allow people to ask questions or voice an opinion more freely. However, ultimately, its much more effective to actually know who has which concerns and asks which questions. This moved to a discussion of collaboration (which typically requires that you know who’s who) versus the broader area of group intelligence (which can include anonymous contributions).

Pentland has some interesting comments on how people’s personal goals are no longer fully aligned with that of their employer: when people worked for the same company for life, there was near-perfect alignment, but now, almost everyone has their own career interests that may go in different directions. This can impact people’s willingness to share in a variety of ways, depending on the particular corporate culture: they may be rewarded for bringing forward innovative ideas by being assigned to “cool” projects, or they may be punished for not toeing the company line.

Solis ended up with five keys to success to group intelligence:

  • Be sensitive to what nature of group work you wish to improve/optimize, e.g., many-to-many
  • Leadership commitment
  • Measurement of collaboration and its impacts
  • New tools create new behaviours, so make sure that the tools that you choose are likely to create the outcomes that you want in terms of behaviours
  • Beware obstacles: think back to the list of impediments above and which are likely to occur in your organization

I’ll be running a collaboration group process design session next week for a client, and you can be sure that I’ll be watching for a lot of the things that I’m hearing here today.