The Workplace Blog

Every leading organization has an intranet or at least some type of shared electronic database to which employees are encouraged to post and discuss. But for the most part, we’ve seen that employees are quite unwilling to contribute to these shared resources. This was one of the factors that doomed the knowledge management movement of the early 1990s.

Customized and personalized portals a decade later were then supposed to resolve the knowledge management issue. But they failed as witnessed by the much discussed “empty portal” syndrome. Several factors contributed to this among them was that employers focused too much on the technical implementations while ignoring the sociological and organizational cultural factors.

Now in 2006, we’re all talking about web 2.0, wikis and blogs and how personal, user driven, bottom up knowledge management is going to make all the difference in the world. Maybe it will, who knows. But I’m not betting that it is going to revolutionalize knowledge management and an employee’s willingness to contribute information to an intranet or a shared database.

Recently, I came across some research by Leo W. Jeffres and Guowei Jian of Cleveland State University that addressed some of the challenges in getting employees to publish to shared resources. The paper introduces a three dimensional conceptual framework to explain employees’ willingness to to contribute to shared electronic databases.

The paper emphasizes that the three dimensions - utilitarian(cost-benefit analysis), normative (identification) and collaborative(collaboration) are equally important. It emphasizes that individual and collective interests are often fundamentally at odds and fundamentally incompatible. As a result, rational employees prefer to “free ride” to minimize their personal cost.

However, the paper also highlights that while employees typically act out of self interest in a utilitarian fashion, the amount they identify philosophically with the organization and their past experiences in collaboration (rewarding versus getting no personal gain) play an important role in their future willingness to collaborate. So look around your office. Issues like office morale and compensation at the team versus individual level, may affect how collaborative employees are - on the intranet or elsewhere.

In the intranet domain we often talk about why we need to establish virtual communities. These conversations sometimes use a loose definition of communities. In an effort to further the discourse, below is a definition of communities and how they differ from networks.

This comes from Barry Wellman at the University of Toronto who says, ” Communities are networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging and social identity.” In contrast to this, as Manuel Castells has explained in The Internet Galaxy, networks are built by the choices and strategies of social actors, be it individuals, families or social groups.

Organizations have networks formed by people, groups and departments in support of specific business ends. Depending upon their importance to themselves or the organization as a whole, these networks are nutured and supported either proactively or passively. In contrast to this, communities are less about choices and strategies and more about interpersonal ties that provide social benefits more than business ones.

And that’s exactly why, virtual communities in many organizations fail. Employers and intranet designers pay too much attention to the business objectives and ignore the importance of creating the shared values that are needed for a social organization. Online communities whether internal or those centered around customers can be of incredible help to companies. But for them to succeed it is important to give them time to evolve in a sociological sense.

As reported by News.com, IBM is adding social networking features to its collaboration suite, in the hope of bringing consumer oriented ideas of Web 2.0 sites to corporate software. It’s nice to see that even IBM recognizes the power of web 2.0 and what it can do for organizations. They are planning to incorporate social bookmarking, group discussions that are less structured and a bookmarking tool.

But it is important to remember that just adding these tools to pieces of enterprise software doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be adopted. These web 2.0 tools work in the context of other business processes, other tools, user motivations and broader cultural factors. By incorporating these tools, IBM is playing catch up more than anything else just BEA Systems and Microsoft have recently done.

If they really want to help organizations collaborate more, these companies should first spend more time studying the drivers that affect collaboration. Depending upon those drivers, specific tools should be targeted towards different industries, company types and employee teams.

Business customers who ask for these tools must also ask for qualified research into how the tools are adopted and used. The last thing employees want is more empty software to deal with. So employers be careful - don’t get caught up in the hype. Understand your business needs and then ask your vendors to explain in business terms (with data points) how those web 2.0 technologies can actually help before you go and buy them.

SXSW is trying to decide panel programming for its 2007 event. And in true web 2.0 style, it is asking potential participants to help them choose the panelists. You view the speaker proposals, choose your top ten, order them as you see fit and then just enter your contact information. I wonder how many votes will be cast in total and whether SXSW will be willing to share the actual vote counts.

While you’re playing around with it, take a look at the “The New Business of Collectivism” speaker proposal by Amy Vickers. She’s a part of the Avenue A | Razorfish Enterprise Solutions practice and yes, this is a not so subtle plug for her!

If you’re still not sure what Web 2.0 is, then here’s a video explanation from the editors of ZDNet. Everybody seems to be defining Web 2.0 these days and that makes me wonder about coinage of the term. Here’s my definition which borrows heavily from o’Reilly over at Boxes and Arrows. Be sure to read the comments at the end of the article.

We talk about collaboration extensively and emphasize its importance. This McKinsey Quarterly article “Mapping the value of employee collaboration” (paid content) sheds light on why exactly and how a company may benefit from collaboration. It highlights companies that are mapping their networks of relationships and are analyzing the economic costs and benefits that key interactions create. The goal - to identify value creating interventions which in simpler terms means to guide the collaborations to be value creating for the organization.