The Workplace Blog

Wired mag has a great article in their latest issue on crowdsourcing and how large corporations are using this to their advantage. There are the more well known examples like youtube using crowds to rank and categorize videos or iStockphoto that leverages amateurs or part-time photographers to sell low cost stock imagery. The article goes beyond those examples to talk about how companies like P&G and Colgate-Palmolive are using amateur scientists to solve scientific challenges. From the wired article…

“The giant packaged goods company needed a way to inject fluoride powder into a toothpaste tube without it dispersing into the surrounding air. Melcarek knew he had a solution by the time he’d finished reading the challenge: Impart an electric charge to the powder while grounding the tube. The positively charged fluoride particles would be attracted to the tube without any significant dispersion.”

Applying the open source model to large enterprise creates a couple of challenges to widely held corporate priorities. Not the least being security and openess in general. Traditionally large enterprises are very guarded around their intellectual property or any of their internal information. Open source is succesful becuase it’s just that open. Most corporations have challenges open up their internal information to their own employees.

Colgage-Palmolive and P&G get around that by using an intermediary called InnoCentive. InnoCentive aggregates the mass of hobbyists out there and focuses them on the right challenges from large and small enterprise. Focusing on opening up the right content in a secure and safe manner will enable enterprises to apply crowdsourcing both from employees internally and externally.

We’ve seen this in some of the more recent applications of digital dashboards. Notice I didn’t call them executive dashboards, because that wouldn’t be leveraging crowdsourcing principles. Dashboards are meant to display metrics on how to run a business. If you aren’t sharing those metrics across the organization how are people going to help guide the business? That’s why we think it’s an important principle to make sure that critical business metrics are shared throughout an organization enabling employees to be able to help guide the business at all levels.

Now here’s another article that I wish I had written. Move Over, Baby Boomers by Paul Greenberg over at CIO magazine discusses Generation X’ers and how as customers and employees they demand far more collaboration than anyone before.

To quote, “Collaborative customer experiences are the watchwords of the new CRM model. That means that a relationship between company and customer provides customers with transparency into corporate thinking, which enables the two parties to craft the customer experience jointly.”

Paul hits the nail on the head with this article. In the not too distant future, the more transparent a company is the more it is likely to succeed in the marketplace. Successful companies will be the ones that are willing to open up their product plans to customers so that they can poke holes at them.

These companies will encourage their employees to reach out to customers and engage in meaningful conversations about their product experiences, interests and future desires. They will setup social networks not just for employees to talk to one another but for employees to talk to customers and business partners. These companies will invite customers into their research labs, boardrooms and factory floors to help them make their products better. And most importantly, these companies will practice simplicity and ease of use like it has never been practiced before.

As I discussed at an Avenue A | Razorfish Client Summit earlier this year, in the world of the future company websites will look like the New York Times as they’ll have to “give” a lot more information before their receive anything in return. And more than that, with outsourcing the rage, the only sustainable competitive advantage will be around the customer experience and ease of use.

Wondering what makes a good customer experience? Business 2.0 can help you. Visit their Bottomline Design Awards to learn about companies that get it.

In another post, I’ll address how the blurring of the lines between customers and employees will impact the corporate intranet.

Stephen Turbek has published an Avenue A | Razorfish white paper this time covering navigation systems. In the paper titled, “Improving Web Navigation with the All-Menu Nav” (PDF) he discusses a new navigation model that depicts all the available navigation items when you move your mouse over the main navigation system.

A navigation system like this has special relevance on an enterprise intranet where different departments compete for attention. Exposing every child navigation item of all the main categories at once, can address some of the problems associated with the location of a particular navigation item. This matters when you have two different categorization principles at play in a navigation menu.

Have I confused you completely? Well, you better read Stephen’s paper. His explainations are far more lucid.

In a blog post, Charlene Li pointed out how media companies are terrified with the idea of losing control of their content. These companies derive their value from either their distribution channel or the content they create. Letting users create their own content, edit the existing content or distribute it themselves is a frightening concept for them.

Just as media companies of the future will generate value online by aggregating and serving audiences better than the competition, so too does your intranet have to play a role like that.

In the future, employees will have no shortage of information sources that helps them do their jobs more efficiently. Employees will only use their corporate intranet if it provides them with original, insightful content and also serves as a content aggregator allowing them to contribute, aggregate, edit and distribute content themselves. It won’t matter if your company creates the content or even controls it, as long as you provide it first and allow your employees to view it in a format that they want to.

Does your intranet do that today? For example, can an employee edit the news page so that unfiltered news from external sources are included? Are you letting your employees control the content? Or are you acting like a traditional media company? Have you asked yourself, who is your intranet’s competition?

Microsoft is re-entering the enterprise search market but this time following a strategy more similar to Google’s who has become the second largest search provider in less than three years. They’re targeting the lower end of the market with a simpler search solution that integrates with sharepoint server. The search binds together separate search solutions and allows employees to search their PCs, corporate intranets and websites and have the results appear on the same interface.

Microsoft has a key advantage over Google and the other enterprise search providers in that it can tightly couple its search product with sharepoint server and its other search tools. Granted, the company has had mixed success with this is strategy in the past, but if Microsoft is truly able to create a seamless search, browse and collaborate experience, it may gain significant traction.

One interesting feature about the new search tool is a functionality called Knowledge Networks. The tool automatically collects and publishes information on an employees’ skills and knowledge so that finding people based on their expertise more efficient by searching automated profiles. While the tool is probably powerful, I wonder how many companies will adopt it. An automated tool that tells you who are the smartest people in your company on a specific subject can upset other employees.

At this rate, should we expect to have tools that analyze our inboxes, documents folders, keyboard strokes and application use to determine how productive we have been in the previous year? Will these tools then tell our HR departments how large a bonus we should be receiving? Technology can be frightening.

Read Bill Gates’s comments at the Microsoft CEO summit where he discusses the new search product. Gates emphasized the “digital workstyle” which in everyday language is a vision for the future of work weaving together top down and bottom up technologies in the workplace. He also discussed how knowledge workers were often frustrated with top down technologies like CRM systems as they were too inflexible.

Depending on your perspective, Web 2.0 is either the latest fad, old ideas in new packaging, or a real change in thinking that business and IT executives need to take very seriously. My vote is for the third perspective says Howard Greenstein in a must read article on Web 2.0 titled, “Web 2.0 Meets The Enterprise” in Optimize magazine.

He discusses how smart CIOs are jumping onto the web 2.0 bandwagon by retooling their applications to take advantage of concepts like marrying systems using XML & RSS. He also discusses how enterprise wikis are used foster grass roots collaboration, blogs for communicating to field staffs (SAP does this) and mashups to tag, filter and organize complex, financial data.

Is your organization web 2.0 ready?

Companies often ignore the power of social capital. They forget that their employees can be more creative and better problem solvers when they have access to other smart people within their company. Strong networks foster cooperation and collaboration and save employees time.

We’re not talking about employee directories on corporate intranets. Employee directories are important and there’s a reason why they’re still considered the intranet’s killer application. However, employee directories just put you in touch with other employees, they don’t tell you who you should get in touch with and whether that person will help you. This is why social capital and tools furthering the social capital in a company matter.

I recently came across an interesting tool called the Reciprocity Ring™. This tool builds connections in a similar fashion to LinkedIn and instills the practice of reciprocity across organizational boundaries. How does it do this?

Users setup a quick profile, view the tutorials and after that may post requests and make contributions to other requests. The system records each request and facilitates a response from the other members in the ring. Users learn to tap into their networks and help others. Moderates can assess how participative each member is. That information can also be shared with other members so you only help those who have a track record of helping others in turn. But what really makes the reciprocity ring succeed is that before doing the tutorial all the potential members of the ring have to participate in a face to face moderated training session.

Collaboration is a hot topic. But for collaboration to be successful; employees need to know who they’re collaborating with and what benefits they may get in return. Companies with intranets that have reciprocity ring type functionality, user centric employee directories and rich user profiles (descriptions of employees next to their contact information) are the ones that can foster collaboration the most. Most importantly, to foster collaboration that truly fuels employee productivity, you have to start in the offline world - you need to make a “real world” connection. This is where the reciprocity ring has potential.

At the IBM Business Leadership Forum in Rome, Thomas Friedman said, “We’ve really gone from the Industrial Age to the Information Age; what we’re now in is what I would call the Talent Age. You see, when the world is flat, all the tools of collaboration and innovation are increasingly becoming commodities, distributed to more people than ever before. The only sustainable edge you have, therefore, as a country, company or an individual, is actually your human talent.”

I couldn’t agree more. Human talent is certainly the most important competitive advantage that a society can have. To truly leverage that human talent successfully companies need to be willing to look outside the boundaries of their workforces to get access to the best ideas. Their next great idea may not come from employees sitting in headquarters, they could come from a sixteen year old working in his bedroom or from someone sitting in China. Looking outside the boundaries of one’s workforce means being willing to share market research, product plans and best practices with the world at large.

Would a company be willing to do that? The truth is that every company will soon have the same access to information, the critical question will be what does one do with the information. The employees may not know the answers. The customers may but they’ll only be willing to share it if they get something in return or if they feel they’re being taken seriously. That’s why companies will need to open up.

So how does this relate to the workforce and intranets in particular? The intranet of the future is going to be “exposed” to customers. Collaboration among employees will not create million dollar ideas. By leveraging human talent more broadly, collaboration between employees and customers will. Tom Friedman is right. The world is flat but only if companies are willing to look outside the boundaries of their office buildings.

Every second day I come across someone waxing profusely about enterprise wikis and how they’re going to change the way knowledge workers interact. I believe in enterprise wikis and I really like wikipedia too. But that doesn’t mean I feel every Fortune 500 needs an enterprise wiki. There are some important truths about enterprise wikis that get ignored often.

The first is that not every knowledge worker wants to collaborate. Putting an edit button on a page doesn’t mean your knowledge workers are going to jump at the opportunity to share their thoughts for free. Enterprise wikis succeed in companies that truly reward collaboration. There aren’t many companies like that.

Secondly, enterprise wikis only work when people feel secure in editing someone else’s work. I can’t imagine many knowledge workers editing their bosses work especially if everyone else is going to see the edits. It just doesn’t happen that frequently. Sure if they’re collaborating on a document and only the two of them have access to the page then maybe. But certainly not otherwise. Before encouraging your knowledge workers to use a wiki, make sure you have a trusted, secure office culture first.

Thirdly, enterprise wikis succeed when they have lots and lots of information on them. I’ve seen this with my company’s own wiki. Until you reach the point of critical mass, knowledge workers won’t bother visiting, publishing or editing. You need to invest in putting stuff up before it can start getting any traction. Interns can actually help here.

And finally, enterprise wikis aren’t successful when they’re approached from an enterprise perspective. The most successful wikis are the ones that target small communities of users within companies that share interests and business problems. So don’t think enterprise-wide, think at the department or the team level first.

Wikis are empowering. And we all love them. The ability to edit a page with a click is powerful. Viewing the history of a page appeals to our voyeuristic sensibilities. And the idea of collaborative, shared knowledge that’s constantly growing and evolving is special. But at the same time, most companies lack the culture to support these concepts. So while I do think wikis will change companies, I feel they’ll change them slowly….one knowledge worker at a time.

CIO Insight have published the results of a survey highlighting emerging technologies in the workplace. Team collaboration, web mapping and expertise location and sharing are getting the most attention within the web and collaboration spaces. Blogs, RSS, Podcasting and Social Networking are being studied less. And among software technologies, open source solutions, alternative browsers and enterprise search are getting the most attention.