A week+ ago I attended the snow-storm abbreviated Center for Information Management Studies (CIMS) workshop at Babson College titled “IT-Enabled Enterprise Collaboration – Where, When and Why?” Three of the four scheduled presentations were held, hearing from Thomas H. Davenport, Karen Sobel Lojeski, and David R. Millen. Thought-provoking presentations all; however, I left feeling that the “Where, When and Why?” in the title was left largely untouched.
Tom Davenport
Tom started by defining his context and interest as “mission critical collaboration,” saying he wasn’t interested in just ‘chatting’ or in Twitter. The hot topic in innovation is ‘open’, e.g. with Linux or the Pharma industry using retired professors to solve problems; however, mission-critical collaboration doesn’t always work — for example Boeing’s Dreamliner schedule delays from challenges in designing and building in a very distributed environment.
To improve collaboration understanding and ultimately performance, Davenport advocated that collaboration should be studied and measured with scientific methods. Tom contrasted the amount of effort applied in analysis of customer insights to the paltry analysis applied to collaboration. A secondary message was the degree of human intervention, e.g. user training and coaching, required for IT-enabled collaboration; with belief that more careful studies could come closer to making this dependency unarguable.
The bulk of the presentation reviewed some “results from various collaborative contexts”:
- Idea management — where Imaginatik study showed best results from discrete collaborative innovation, e.g a two-hour workshop versus the on-going “suggestion box.”
- Predication markets at Google — drawing out the absence of independence and relatively low participation rates…the idea is wisdom of crowds, but crowds are not participating.
- Morten T. Hansen and Martine R. Haas study showing that
…document suppliers that occupied a crowded segment of the firm’s internal knowledge market gained less attention from employees (measured as monthly use of their database) but were able to combat this negative competitive effect by being selective and concentrated in their document supply. This result reveals a paradox of information supply in competitive information markets: the less information a supplier offered, the more it was used, because the supplier developed a reputation for quality and focus.
Further motivation for me in my day-job content management duties.
- Tom’s own work with Rob Cross and others, as documented in The Social Side of Performance and Strategies for Preventing a Knowledge-Loss Crisis.
Karen Sobel Lojeski
(Stony Brook engineering professor and author of Uniting the Virtual Workforce: Transforming Leadership and Innovation in the Globally Integrated Enterprise
Karen began with asserting that (1) we are all “virtual workers” — anyone with wireless and depending on electronic meditated communications, and (2) to our detriment we are still using the methods of Frederick Winslow Taylor in this world. She went on define a mathematical model for ‘virtual distance’ that has three primary factors: physical distance, operational distance, and affinity distance (e.g. extent of shared culture and interdependence). [Side note: given the factors and accompanying description, 'digital distance' would be a more memorable label for me.] Karen noted, Thomas Friedman
Also see Michael Krigsman’s 2006 ZDNet interview: Karen Lojeski on Virtual Distance.
David Millen
Of the three presentations, this one was the most interesting for me as it provided a further glimpse into IBM’s internal social media journey that I have been actively following for going on ten years…being curious both as a former IBM-er and as someone playing catch-up in the subject area in two successive day-jobs.
David live demo-ed the following behind-the-firewall applications: Dogear social bookmarking, Beehive social networking, and Cattail file-sharing .
With my day-job I’m still not fully settled with the more social aspects of social networking and I tend to fall into the camp that David mentioned regarding “most people would question the business value of photo-sharing”; however, David argued value derived in company culture building including enculturating new-hires, and institutional memory. I’m slowly warming to the idea of what starts as more social connections (employees that like the same movies?) can still lead to connections then leveraged for more business ends.
In category of “things I hadn’t thought about yet” was a brief side discussion regarding potentially conflicting objectives for recommendation engines; for example, the difference between extending the employee’s network into new unexpected but beneficial directions versus the filling in the already existing implicit network in the sense of the “you may also know” recommendations. I also found the concept of using a recommendation engine for queuing questions to answer in a profile an interesting and novel (to me) approach with likely additional use cases beyond profiles.
I asked if users gave push-back regarding maintaining multiple profiles/personas internally — something that I put up with (and occassionally want) in internet, but have hopes of avoiding inside the firewall. David acknowledged as some concern and that the answer was likely not a single profile even inside firewall.
