Here is a weblog worth while subscribing to that you may not have seen before: The WorkPlace Blog. Here is a fragment of what the main topics are from that weblog itself: “[…] The blog covers news, trends, commentary, events and emerging technologies that are affecting the enterprise workplace […]“. Interesting weblog, indeed ! In it you would be able to find little gems like the one I bumped into a couple of days ago and which I thought would be worth while commenting on: The Truth about Enterprise Wikis and that clearly puts together why wikis, like most social software available out there, may not be suitable for all businesses. And here is why:

• Reluctance to collaborate: Indeed, I certainly agree with that statement. Not everyone is keen on collaborating with others. There would be some knowledge workers out there who would feel rather comfortable in their own silos than going out there and collaborate with others. And while that may be a valid point, which I doubt, I am wondering how much that would be sustainable. Right now the buzzword is collaboration (Get out there and share with others) thus if there are people out there who are not willing to collaborate how long would they be able to sustain the situation? The way I see it is that if a knowledge worker would want to survive I doubt he / she would be able to do that by not collaborating with others. At least, not in the current business environment. But, still it would be a factor to consider if you are planning to deploy widely different collaborative tools, like a wiki, for instance.
• Trust: Yes, this is something that everyone who has been exposed to a Wiki would agree with that it is a key element for the success of not only that tool but most of the social media available out there. I have widely weblogged about this particular topic several times in the past and I still think that it is actually the tipping point that would eventually differentiate a labour-based company from asset/knowledge based company. Knowledge workers in order to survive in the current business world would need to learn rather quick how they can trust one another, how they can build their trust skills with others in such a way that collaboration would be considered a natural and a business as usual process within the business. Wikis can certainly help out in here. Certainly, it would take a bit of time at the beginning but knowledge workers who persevere would be the ones that would benefit the most not only because of their trust levels with others getting stronger but because they would also act as catalysts for others to join them in that same effort. People need to collaborate, they need to trust, so they might as well start somewhere.
• Critical Mass: This may not be rocket science for anyone reading this weblog, I am sure, but there is no denying that The Workplace Blog has got a point. Specially with social software having a critical mass becomes really important for the survival of the application, in this case a wiki. Why? Well, because if there is anything to be said about social software is the fact that it is all about the people, thus if you do not have the people you do not have anything! That is the main reason why at the early stages of deploying a social media application it is always a good thing to have a technical facilitator or a group of technical facilitators that could guide the rest of the knowledge workers in finding their way(s) to interact with the tools, i.e. a wiki, at hand. Knowing that you have got the opportunity to consult with someone on your experience while adopting new tools is perhaps the easiest way to overcome the learning curve hurdle. Then once knowledge workers are comfortable with making use of those tools they can become self-sufficient and those technical facilitators could move into whatever the next task may be.
• Start small: Like in the adoption of any critical application within the workplace it is always, indeed, a good thing to start small. Knowledge workers have got a tendency to get overwhelmed by an enterprise-wide adoption of whatever the tool, not just wikis, so it would always be advantageous to actually start with perhaps a pilot or two with a relatively small audience so that people are encouraged to participate in an environment where they can share information and knowledge with their somewhat reduced trusted network in such a way that they can then prepare the way at a later time if the pilot has been successful.

  This would actually serve a couple of different points: first, people would be keener on sharing knowledge and information in an environment where they feel they have got something to contribute and, secondly, once you have finished with that pilot and may be ready for an Enterprise-wide adoption that same group of knowledge workers could actually become that critical mass that could advocate for the further adoption of the tool within the workplace.

Thus, as you may have been able to see there are a number of different items that knowledge workers would need to work on further while preparing the adoption of whatever the social software offering, because I feel that the concerns mentioned over at The Truth about Enterprise Wikis are not just restricted to wikis but to every piece of social software that knowledge workers may get exposed to. The good thing is that with the right motivation, commitment, trust and involvement to make it work those hurdles are more likely to disappear. And for good.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Management, KM, Social Software, Social Networking, Enterprise Collaboration, WorkPlace, Wikis, Trust, Critical Mass

Last Friday you would remember how I created a weblog post around the Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop taking place this week in Edinburgh. Right then I mentioned that I would be sharing some of my thoughts on some of the different sessions that will be taking place and which I thought would be worth while commenting some more. Emanuele mentioned that there would be some live conblogging going on at the Wiki space they have set up, thus we shall see how it will all get going.

One of the sessions that I was really looking forward to, specially since I have been wanting to weblog about it for some time is the one that two of my IBM colleagues, Tessa Lau and Steve Farrell, will be doing on people-tagging for the Enterprise. It is called Fringe Contacts - People-Tagging for the Enterprise and you will be able to find the presentation over here. Here is the wiki space as well where discussion about the presentation itself will be taking place during and after the event, I suppose.

In the past you would remember how I have been talking about people tagging with such interesting offerings as Tagalag, but with Fringe Contacts things would be slightly different because with it you are able to tag people as opposed to people’s e-mails addresses which is what Tagalag does.

Another substantial difference between Fringe Contacts and whatever other tagging services is that in most cases those tagging offerings would be tagging resources whereas in Fringe Contacts the focus is to tag people, your peers, your knowledge experts, your subject matter experts.

On the presentation itself you would be able to see a screen shot of what it actually looks like: how you can tag anyone in the company; how a number of different tag suggestions are presented to you if you are not sure how you are going to tag a particular individual; how there is a tag-based name completion so that you can speed up the process a bit; how you can use different visualisation techniques through clouds; how you can import your buddy list and tag them on the fly; etc. etc.

Next to Fringe Contacts you would be able to see as well an, internally available only, FireFox extension called Tommy! (By another one of my IBM colleagues, Helder Luz) that helps you surf IBM’s Intranet a whole lot much more enjoyable than from whatever other browser. It has got lots of different integration points with other IBM tools, like the employee directory, or IBM’s weblogging engine (Blog Central), amongst others, and, of course, Fringe Contacts so that you can tag people along the way while navigating through the Intranet. Pretty neat, indeed.

But it gets better, because the next version of Fringe Contacts is actually BluePages+1 (In the presentation itself you can get to see a screen shot of what it would look like, in case you want to check it out), that somehow puts everything together of what I have been explaining so far along with some org. charts and directories, next to syndicated content like weblogs, bookmarks from Dogear, whatever publications, patents, and the like, along with the clouds that I have been mentioning above as well. Yes, I know, Peoplefeeds and Suprglu on steroids!

In the presentation as well you would see how tagging takes a new form in the shape of Instant Messaging with the work done so far on integrating this tagging infrastructure for Sametime related contacts using Gaim. Yes, tagging the folks you chat the most with in real-time. How much collaborative can you get ?

However, the great thing about all this people-tagging is the fact that with the data put together people could move things into the next step which is providing some visualisations of how the data is produced so that you would be able to establish connections not only based on the tags you may have used but also on the people who have been tagged using whatever the criteria. In the presentation itself you would be able to find one example of how this would look like. Pretty cool, indeed.

Then from there onwards on the presentation itself you would be able to find some statistics of how IBMers are actually making use of all these tools in order to be able to connect with others. In short, you would be able to see some first hand data of how IBM is making progress with this people-tagging initiative called Fringe Contacts. Lots of good things taking place, I am sure you would agree with, but one aspect that has not been mentioned quite a lot is how incredibly effective this application would turn out to be as an expertise locator tool. Being able to search for other subject matter experts by just using meaningful tags that the community has been using is something that we may not have seen it elsewhere before. It kind of reminds me of Ziki, but again on steroids given the huge amount of resources syndicated into a single focal point of entry. However, that people-tagging would become really powerful if everyone gets to use it, but even with just a few folks using it it would still prove to be rather useful since everyone, not just the taggers, would benefit from searching and navigating through those tags / people in order to locate those experts.

Technorati Tags: Tagging, Folksonomy, Knowledge Management, KM, Social Networking, Fringe Contacts, Tommy!, BluePages+1, Gaim, Peoplefeeds, Suprglu, Ziki, People Tagging

If yesterday I created a weblog post around the topic of Folksonomy in The Name Game - Where Folksonomy Meets Taxonomy I am sure that you would find today’s weblog post worth while reading on further as well. Earlier on this morning I was actually talking to one other weblogger who has done some incredible work around the topic of folksonomies and tagging and we actually had a very interesting conversation through Skype. His name is Emanuele Quintarelli and you can find more information about him and his work over at InfoSpaces. Later on and as I go along I will be sharing some further thoughts on some of the great weblog posts he has shared so far around the topic of tagging and folksonomies. Thus stay tuned!

Anyway, while we were having the conversation, he actually mentioned one particular event that will be taking place beginning of next week on Monday in Edinburgh and that I am sure would be of great interest to all those folks interested in this very same subject: Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop. As you will be able to see at the main schedule home page, it will be a packed up workshop with some very good sessions. I have been reading some of the different abstracts and some of the thoughts and ideas put together are quite interesting and thought provoking. So much so that I have decided that I will be talking about a few of them over the next few weblog posts.

As you will be able to see from the agenda itself there would be a couple of fellow IBM colleagues speaking at the event, too, on how IBM is actually making use of tagging in the enterprise and in particular one of the papers would be about one particular research tool that uses people tagging and that I will be providing some further details on shortly. It is called Fringe Contacts. I have been wanting to talk about it all along, specially since Dogear and ThinkPlace have been mentioned already, thus you can expect a couple of posts on the subject.

I couldn’t find anywhere on the website, or related sites, information on whether they will be recording some of these sessions or not and make them available, perhaps, as podcasts but I do surely hope so because I would be very interested in hearing the live talks around a number of them. We shall see. Anyway since a few of my colleagues would be going there and presenting I am hoping they will be doing some conblogging of their experiences, whether they would do it internally or externally. Either way, I shall be sharing my thoughts about some of the different abstracts as I feel they are interesting enough to trigger some further discussion.

Finally, I just wanted to thank Emanuele for getting in touch with me and for making the connection. Way cool! I am sure we will be talking some more about this particular and exciting topic in the next few weeks. Will keep you posted ! For the time being if you are interested in the world of folksonomies and tagging I would encourage you to subscribe to his weblog feed as it would be a worth while read for sure. Thanks again, Emanuele! Will speak to you soon!

Technorati Tags: Folksonomy, Tagging, Tags, Knowledge Management, KM, Social Networking

A few days ago, Dennis McDonald pointed me to a weblog post where a recent CIO article on tagging was mentioned. The article itself is titled The Name Game and it comes to talk about tagging in general with some special mention of how IBM is handling it within the corporation. Although it is a long read there are some really good points and would certainly be a worth while read, specially if you are into tagging and folksonomy in order to organise your content, wherever that may be. Here are some highlights from the article worth noting:

“Tagging offers a potentially powerful way for a company to organize information by making fresh content immediately searchable, letting users designate terms that make sense to them and providing users with a sense of ownership. This ability for tags to provide so much content-describing power for ordinary folks has given rise to the term “folksonomy,” as opposed to the more restrictive sounding “taxonomy.”" (Emphasis mine)

What a great definition for what tagging is all about! I doubt there would be much better ways to define it than the one quote above. What I really liked about it is the fact that as you will be able to see in here tagging is all about the end-users, the knowledge workers, taking control of how the content will be stored and searched for at a later time using meaningful keywords that they could relate to as opposed to have to go through the ordeal of a fixed taxonomy that wasn’t rather created for them nor would it represent their needs. That would probably be the main difference between folksonomy and taxonomy.

““You can see what your colleagues are interested in,” she says. “From a collaboration and knowledge-sharing perspective, that’s what’s neat about folksonomies.”“

That particular highlight comes from a colleague of mine, Maria Arbusto, while talking about an IBM internal offering for employees to drop ideas and work on them further. ThinkPlace. I must say that I have been using that application for a number of months and it certainly works in exact the same way as Maria describes it. People would just drop by, search for ideas that would match their interests, they would navigate through tags and find other people with similar interests and ideas, which would help them then to connect and, of course, collaborate from there. So you can see how tagging brings forward a more dynamic perspective as far as knowledge sharing and collaboration is concerned. It is actually a whole lot more proactive than having to work with fixed taxonomies that may not represent the needs from those knowledge workers and therefore make it very hard to use. Simplicity is key in folksonomy, if you would ask me.

“But with tagging, users gain the flexibility to work outside the taxonomy“

Perhaps one of the key aspects of every single piece of social software. That flexibility is perhaps what makes it so successful as it would try to fill in all of the different needs people would have about it. It may succeed or fail, but there is no doubt that at least it will try to meet the different expectations from everyone. And the good thing is that because of that social aspect it will probably be able to succeed in most cases.

“Dogear was opened for use across IBM in November, and a mere 1,235 of IBM’s 329,000 employees have logged in to the tool more than once“

I have been using Dogear myself for a number of months, in fact, if you remember, I have been weblogging already about Dogear several times already, and although it may seem like a small number of folks making use of it, giving the size of IBM (Over 320.000 employees) I must say that the focus is not on the numbers but on the actual technology and how a subset of those employees are exploring new ways of managing content through that dynamic tagging. As it is mentioned on the article itself as well you would only need a small portion of folks, yes, the well known critical mass, to make it worth while for everyone else. Just imagine the potential you would be having in your hands if when searching for content you would bump into the bookmarks that people may have shared, and tagged, and which may perhaps be even more relevant than the different results put together. And that with just a few folks making use of it. At least, at the very beginning.

We may indeed be at the early stages for tagging in the enterprise but there is no denying that the benefits are there, even if it is just for a small group of end-users. Chances are that as soon as those benefits are brought forward into the table and spread around through whatever means that more and more people would jump in to give it a try. And that is perhaps when we would be able to reach the tipping point where a combination of folksonomy and taxonomy would eventually allow every knowledge worker find the information they want it, when they want it and in the format they would want. Because after all we should not forget that tagging and folksonomy is not planning, by far, to replace the already taxonomies, but more to augment the already existing ones to make them much more meaningful, relevant, and specific to people’s needs. And that is a good thing, don’t you think so ?

Technorati Tags: Tagging, Tags, Folksonomy, Knowledge Management, KM, Social Networking, Social Software

Earlier on today, and through TailRank, I have come across an interesting article by Jennifer Whittier on the topic of corporate blogging: Corporate Blogging: Six Steps Help Ensure At-Work Blogs Are An Asset. It surely is a worth while article to go through specially for those folks out there who are planning to implement weblogging in their businesses to augment knowledge sharing and collaboration between knowledge workers and their clients. Reason being the fact that things may not be as easy as what other people may have been portraying all along. Indeed, corporate webloggers, as more and more are starting to come up, would need to follow a different set of guidelines in order to keep things on track and allow for that flow of the conversation(s) to run smooth and where everyone would benefit from it. Most companies out there, according to the article, haven’t considered implementing such guidelines, which basically means, in its due time, potential trouble ahead. It may not happen, for sure, but it may well happen. And for the latter case corporations would need to be ready to respond, otherwise the damage would be far too much and perhaps impossible to recover from.

That is the actual purpose of Corporate Blogging: Six Steps Help Ensure At-Work Blogs Are An Asset. An important read for those folks who are not sure how to get things started on the corporate weblogging world in order to help knowledge workers get the most of out it without causing much damage. In that particular article attorney James Erwin clearly indicates what would be some of the key steps to take into account whenever whatever business decides to embark on the weblogging experience in order to augment not only how people share their knowledge and experiences but also how they would communicate with others. There is no doubt that more and more businesses are seeing the many benefits of introducing weblogs to their knowledge workers, however, for the corporate webloggers there needs to be some guidance and James ventures into providing some really good tips, which you can find below:

1. “Expressly include blogging within the same rules that govern acceptable use of email and Internet;
2. Prohibit employees from disclosing or discussing any confidential or proprietary information;
3. Remind employees that they are expected to be respectful of the company, its employees, its customers and its competitors; and are not to post material that contains harassing, discriminatory or threatening content, no matter when or where the blogging is conducted:
4. Require employees to use their real name, not an alias, and; employees must make it clear that the views they express online are their own and not those of the employer. This policy adds credibility to the blog, as it will be viewed by readers as an independent source of information.
5. Require that any reader responses to a blog be edited for profanity, harassing, discriminatory or threatening content directed toward the company, its employees, its customers, and its competitors.
6. Create an agreement with each blogger as to the purpose of the blog, the amount of company time you will allow the blogger to devote to the practice, and any necessary restrictions regarding overtime compensation for off-site blogging.”

I certainly agree with James that following those initial steps people would be off to a good start and it would be a win-win situation for everyone. But perhaps things could be taken further a bit more and improve the overall experience. Certainly, corporate webloggers would need to have some guidelines about what is ok to publish and what isn’t, we all agree on that, but how about if instead of having the company creating that policy and set of guidelines it is actually the group of corporate webloggers themselves the ones defining and creating those guidelines? Would that work ? In my opinion, it would certainly work. More than anything else because of two key and important aspects: involvement and commitment.

Getting corporate webloggers involved from the very beginning in defining most of those guidelines would certainly help people get the message that their voices and opinions are very much heard in defining the policy that would then be used by themselves, so if they would feel comfortable with them throughout the whole process they would feel even more comfortable when the guidelines are out there and people start to follow them, since they were the first ones who put them together in the first place. So instead of being pushed top-down whatever the policy and guidelines on weblogging it is actually the webloggers who are in control of what those should be and how they themselves should follow them. Yes, I know, you see where I am going to, power to the people! Let them decide what they would want to follow and give them the freedom to define those guidelines. There is a great chance that they would actually follow them and help avoid whatever future confrontations or potential conflicts.

As an example, that is how the IBM Weblogging Policy and Guidelines was put together in the first place a few months ago. A bunch of us, corporate webloggers, got together, set up a wiki space and started sharing what we thought would be the best policies for ourselves to get started with weblogging efforts. And after a couple of weeks of constant updates the IBM Weblogging Policy and Guidelines was the end result. And from there onwards, and thinking about those guidelines, it is up to us to follow them accordingly. Or not. Our choice, indeed, but, at least, we know what we are up to and what the potential limits might be. If any. We decide.

Technorati Tags: Metablogging, Corporate Blogging, Knowledge Management, KM, Weblogs

A couple of days ago I created a weblog post on a recent interview that Seth Kahan did to John Kotter on The Power of Storytelling and then yesterday I created another weblog post detailing Why Storytelling Is Important. And I thought that today I could share with you another interesting interview by Seth but this time around the interviewee is no more, no less than Steve Denning, one of the first pioneers on storytelling and storyteller extraordinaire. The interview can be found over here: Storytelling and Social Networks and there are plenty of gems over there to touch base on. So here is my take on the interview itself:

“[…] so that command-and-control and mechanistic management is universally seen as an anomaly, an aberration, an exception to be used only in very unusual circumstances, if at all”

I couldn’t have agreed more with this statement to be honest. I think that with the emergence of social software, the so called Web 2.0, we are in a unique situation where that command-and-control attitude from management becomes unsustainable, more than anything else because people are starting to get the message that in the current business environment if one would want to succeed they would have to let things go; encourage people to participate more, to share knowledge and collaborate more with others and in this case not just with other knowledge workers but also with their clients. That democratising of this knowledge sharing culture is what would make that model sustainable. That command-and-control culture may work for a few months but certainly not much longer. People now are demanding that freedom to share what they know with others whenever there is a need for it, and even without that need, and managers would probably need to understand now that it would be much better if they would concentrate on promoting that cultural change than to try to control everything else.

I do realise that there are a few businesses out there who still don’t seem to get it, but then again I am kind of thinking that it will not be too long before they would run into trouble. Things are happening fast, perhaps too fast, and the fact that knowledge workers would want to adapt quickly is something that should not be stopped, nor controlled. And whoever would do that would eventually run into trouble, in one way or another, like Steve mentions in “The problem is that command-and-control kills passion” and we all know that social software and the subsequent knowledge sharing and collaboration is driven mainly by passion.

“Story is almost the only way you can get people to really believe in a different kind of future and start wanting something different”

Indeed, and that is perhaps the main reason why social networks are so popular at the moment, because whether we like it or not, people love telling stories in order to share knowledge and learn from one another. Be it with their involvement in wikis, or through their own weblogs, social bookmarks, photos, you name it. All sorts of different tools available out there for a single purpose: telling a story, deliver a message, getting involved with others through those social networks. I, too, feel that we may be at the tipping point where organisations would start considering that a key successful factor to continue promoting a knowledge sharing culture is not done with a focus on the tools, the technologies nor the processes but actually with a focus on the people (Yes, I realised I have mentioned this a few times already) and one integral process to continue with that focus is through something so people-minded as stories and storytelling. If you come to think about it, storytelling has been there for thousands of years and it has always been able to make it through the times, no matter how hard they were. Thus perhaps we are now witnessing the final awakening where people start valuing where true knowledge sharing and collaboration should be coming from: Storytelling and Social Networks.

Technorati Tags: Storytelling, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, KM, Steve Denning