Tags: Tagging, Tags, Folksonomy, Taxonomy, Enterprise 2.0, E2.0, Enteprise 2.0 Conference, Twitter, Thomas Vander Wal, Vanderwal, Slideshare, Social Tagging, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Media, Web 2.0, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Communities

Today I am actually going to take a short break from the various reviews around the topic of the different elective sessions I recently attended at the APQC KM & Innovation event in Houston, and instead talk about one particular, and very helpful, resource I bumped into earlier on today which I think would be very very helpful for those folks who may be new to the subject. It all came to me after reading a number of different weblog entries related to the Enterprise 2.0 conference that finished earlier on this afternoon.

I bumped into it originally in one of the twitterings from Thomas Vander Wal where he actually shared the link to the presentation materials that he has used earlier on today for an elective session with the title Bottom-up All The Way Down: How Tags Help Businesses Organize. You can already check it out over at Slideshare and if you would want to have a peek into what the talk was about here is an excerpt taken from the conference agenda:

"Tagging has become one of the most recognizable motifs in web 2.0 social applications. Allowing all participants in social spaces — blogs, social networks, web 2.0 applications — to annotate bits of information with individually defined metadata is an acceptance of the value of collective intelligence, on one hand, and on the value to the individual of an individually ordered world. Will tagging work in the enterprise? Can individual employees — as a group — do a better job of organizing information through tags than IT?"

I must say that when I looked into the slide deck in Slideshare I thought that it would be a rather long presentation, since it contains 82 slides. However, when I took a few minutes to go through and digest the content, it is actually a lovely breeze to go through it. Yes, indeed, this is one of those different presentations that you know will be very informative and educational for everyone interested in the topic of tagging and folksonomies, not just from a Web 2.0 perspective, but much more interestingly from an Enterprise 2.0 perspective.

Yes, that is right, with that particular presentation, Thomas attempts (And succeeds tremendously!) to introduce the topic of tagging behind the firewall going through some very key basic overview of what tagging and folksonomy are, as concepts, and then introduces the comparison between taxonomy and folksonomy, which after going through it I have found it quite fascinating and very revealing for those folks out there who still question the value of tagging within the enterprise.

From there onwards Thomas gets to provide a good outline of the different business benefits from using tags within the corporation in order to empower knowledge workers to successfully tag the content they bump into as they go along. He even ventured into explaining some of the different reasons as to why people tag (See slide 37), which I have found very interesting because they surely match most of my own reasons on why I keep tagging almost everything!

However, what I have found very inspiring and perhaps somewhat controversial, specially since most folks out there may not be familiar with it, is the powerful connotations that social tagging has got within whatever business. Thomas describes this in a very simple, yet very effective manner, concluding with a number of concrete different examples of social tagging tools. And from there onwards, he actually touches base on a number of those different social tagging tools and how they operate by sharing a number of different screen shots. I would have loved to have attended his session for this particular bit as I am sure that I would have learned quite a few tricks on effective methods for tagging. Perhaps at some other time.

What I can certainly say though is that those folks, who are looking for a comprehensive, easy to digest, straight to the point, with no fuss presentation, and providing some rock solid conclusions on the topic of tagging and folksonomy behind the firewall, should certainly check the slide deck themselves. Because I am sure that they would find it relevant enough for them, and positively encouraging for everyone, on why tagging resources (And people, why not?) is worth while regarding the size of the business that is trying to implement them. I can certainly recommend this presentation and on top of it you also have got the chance to download the slide deck and share it with your colleagues. Just brilliant!

Thanks ever so much, Thomas, for sharing the presentation in Slideshare with us all and for giving us the opportunity to get a glimpse of some of the really high quality  materials seeing over at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Excellent stuff!

(It was also a great pleasure catching up with you just before you headed to the event and look forward to the next round of conversations!)

Tags: APQC, APQC2007, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, KM Events, Innovation, KM Training, KM Learning, Communities, Communities of Practice, CoPs, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, KM 2.0, Houston, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Wikis, Ann Majchrzak, Collective Wisdom, Collective Intelligence, Knowledge Exchange, Knowledge Relationships, Meta-Knowledge

And so we carry on with more reviews from the different sessions I attended at the APQC KM & Innovation event in Houston back in May. And this time around attending one of the sessions, that I was surely looking forward to, and which would resonate quite a bit with you folks, since I have been talking about the same subject a few times over here already. Oh, and with perfect timing while the Enterprise 2.0 conference is taking place in Boston, which, by the way, I am hoping you are all catching up with as some of the conversations are incredibly exciting.

Yes, that is right! Ann Majchrzak’s session was one of the very few that touched on the subject of social computing within the corporate world and how different businesses are making extensive use of it. In particular, this time around, of wikis. I was actually surprised about how there weren’t many sessions around the impact of social software within the enterprise, so this particular elective session from Ann was very much appreciated and refreshing!

I wish I were able to share the slide deck online. My comments in here are not going to make it much justice so I am hoping that at some point I may be able to bump into them and share them over here. But in her presentation Ann put together some really nice, brief and straight forward background as to what wikis are, how they operate and how different organisations are starting making heavy use of them. Yes, one of the reasons why I really enjoyed Ann’s pitch was the fact that she was using concrete real examples of how businesses are already making use of wikis in order to help boost their knowledge sharing and collaboration efforts for a wide range of different tasks: company intranet; distributed meeting coordination, project management and documentation, recruiting process management, competition tracking, bug tracking (Help Desk), CRM, etc. etc.

Really nice and an eye opener for those folks out there who may still be skeptic. But not to worry, it got better! Indeed, during the course of the session she actually shared some really good tips on how to get different wikis off to a great start! Here are some of the highlights she went through:

"- Start small with seeds
- Let anyone in
- Don’t duplicate content; point to shared content instead
- Don’t just add ideas, build on others
- Don’t just ask questions and criticise; build and evolve
- Revel in diversity of openness

Multi-user, evolutionary, error-correcting, knowledge integrating, idea-stretching"

From there onwards Ann mentioned a number of different reasons as to why wikis may just well be *that* quasi-perfect collaborative and knowledge sharing tool that you may have been looking for:

"* Coordination across time zones (vs. chat)
* Service entire enterprise of collaborators (vs. groupware)
* Encourage diverse knowledge sources (vs. portals)
* Allow lurkers (i.e. non-contributing readers) from anywhere
* Hi knowledge organisation and maintenance (vs. discussion forums)"

After showing those different reasons with some really good and crystal clear explanations we were off to check out through the different slides a good number of companies who are already using wikis both inside and outside of the firewall in order to encourage that non-hierarchical and democratic collaboration across the board. Quite interesting to see how a good bunch of these companies are already heavily involved with adopting wikis, and a clear sign that there is no way back. Almost everyone out there is testing the tools and see if they would meet their requirements and needs. And the good thing is that most businesses out there are trying them out to see if they would be able to help out improve the current knowledge sharing and collaboration tools suite as opposed to replace it, which is something that I have been saying myself for a while:

No need to kill the current collaborative tools suite in place, rather, much much better, augment it with what is coming up in the social software space!

Finally, after detailing some differences between the Shapers and the Adders and a brief description of  how they each contribute and regard a particular wiki she came to the following conclusion, which, I think, was right spot on!:

"We are just beginning to explore and exploit collaborative knowledge exchange, knowledge relationships, and the arising meta-knowledge"

Thus, who said that wikis didn’t have a chance within the corporate world? Who said that wikis are just fun tools with no further business value for the enterprise? Well, this is one of those presentations that will certainly prove otherwise, and, like I said, this weblog post does not make it any justice from the great stuff that Ann shared with us. At a later time in the conference, I had the chance to talk to her at the cocktail reception and the conversation on wikis, mashups and social computing was certainly one of the highlights of the event for me. Incredibly re-energising and very enlightening and educational. If you ever get a chance to listen to her, by all means, do! She has got a few things to say in this space, for sure!

Tags: APQC, APQC2007, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, KM Events, Innovation, KM Training, KM Learning, Communities, Communities of Practice, CoPs, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, KM 2.0, Houston, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Informal Communities, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Alice Dunlap-Kraft, Mary Ellen Sullivan, Global Business Services, GBS, Wiki Central, Wikis, ThinkPlace, Lotus Sametime, Sametime 7.5.1, Blog Central, Blogs, Dogear, Social Bookmarking, Activities, Activity Centric Computing, Social Network Analysis, SNA, SmallBlue, Second Life, Virtual Worlds, Lynn Busby, Connections, Trust, Conversations, Slideshare

Following further up with some more weblog posts from the APQC KM & Innovation event, this time around I am going to be talking about something that I was asked during the conference event several times and that only now I have finally managed to make it possible for everyone. As you may all recall from several weblog entries, I was actually attending the APQC event because I was going to speak along with a couple of my colleagues, Alice Dunlap-Kraft and Mary Ellen Sullivan, around the subject of communities and how they keep driving innovation further inside IBM.

The title of the session we did was Communities: Hotbeds of Innovation at IBM. And in that presentation we tried to cover a number of different topics from one of the various different community building programmes we currently have inside IBM, in particular from the Global Business Services business unit community building programme.

The presentation is divided in three distinct blocks, covered each of them by one of us:

1. First section where you would find out some bits and pieces of information around the subject of what IBM is doing in the area of Innovation, and innovation that matters, with concrete examples like InnovationJam and ThinkPlace (Which I have blogged about just recently as well). This was covered by Alice Dunlap-Kraft.

2. Second section (This is the piece that I did myself) was around the subject of Collaboration Technology and in here we tried to cover a good number of different examples from various communities making effective use of social computing and social software tools in order to help drive innovation further by sharing their knowledge and collaborating amongst community members. In this part of the deck you will see then:

- How various IBM communities are making use of internal wikis (Wiki Central) to conduct online massive brainstorm sessions on specific topics;
- How they are also making use of internal wikis (Wiki Central) to collaboratively work on ThinkPlace ideas to help bring them into implementation;
- How they are also making use of group collaborative IM tools like Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 (Through the extensive use of various community related plugins);
- How they have been using internal blogs (Blog Central) to continue further with different conversations that may have started elsewhere and still keep them going strong;
- How they have been using social bookmarks (Dogear) to help organise and tag content related to the community or to innovation related resources and whatever else;
- How they have been taking advantage of ThinkPlace’s social computing capabilities (i.e. Tagging) to connect ideas with other ideas, but also community members with other members who would collaborative work on progressing further with those same ideas;
- How they have been making good use as well of Activities (i.e. Activity Centric Computing) in order to find better ways of collaborating than just through other traditional tools like e-mail;
- And, finally, how they have been able to use different Social Network Analysis tools, i.e. SmallBlue.in order to find out how the community operates internally and how different members of the community are connecting and collaborating with one another based on a multi complex layer of interactions from various community tools.

3. Finally, the third section, covered by May Ellen Sullivan is actually a case study from one of the most robust and mature IBM communities within this particular programme. It is called the Global Innovation Community and in this case study you would be able to see how the community came into existence, how the community members are getting together, what its main goals would be and how the community is making extensive use of social software tools to help members collaborate with one another. Special attention as well on how they have been able to explore the different opportunities from the virtual worlds, like Second Life.

And that would be it. That is the basic outline of the presentation which I have already shared over at Slideshare and which I am embedding over here as well further down below. If you are interested in getting a copy of the slide deck you would be able to get them as well from that same link. And to finish off the presentation here are the closing remarks from the presentation from one good friend of mine and fellow IBMer; Lynn Busby:

"Innovation is the creative side of collaboration
Collaboration is built on trust
Trust is built on relationships
Relationships are built by getting to know others"

(If you have got a comment or some further feedback input feel free to drop a comment over here, over at the Slideshare link or contact me offline)

Tags: APQC, APQC2007, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, KM Events, Innovation, KM Training, KM Learning, Communities, Communities of Practice, CoPs, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, KM 2.0, Houston, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Lessons Learned, Informal Communities, Wikipedia, Wikia, Jimmy Wales, Wikis, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Dave Snowden

You would remember how I have been creating a couple of weblog entries to comment further on the first keynote speaker session from the APQC KM & Innovation event hosted in Houston beginning of May. Well, today I am going to continue further with some further reviews from the different sessions I attended, but from here onwards, and since most of the presentation materials are / were not available, I will keep the weblog entries a lot shorter describing roughly what I liked and what I thought could improve from each of them. As time goes by, and as the presentation materials may become available, I shall be updating the posts to include the download URL, if applicable. So let’s get things going with the next one.

This particular keynote session was actually one of the main reasons why I wanted to attend the APQC KM & Innovation event. Nothing more, nothing less than watching live Jimmy Wales, talking away about both Wikipedia and Wikia. This was the first time that I ever got to attend live a session from someone who I highly consider influential in shaping up some of the different changes we are going through at the moment with the adoption of social computing in order to share knowledge and collaborate with other knowledge workers. So I had plenty of expectations about it all along and I must say that after watching Jimmy live all of that excitement and high expectations just died rather rapidly. What a missed opportunity! And it looks like I wasn’t the only one sensing that same disappointment.

Don’t take me wrong. The presentation itself was really good, very informative, straight to the point highlighting some of the major achievements from Wikipedia over the last few years. How it grew from nothing into becoming one of the most influential resources on the Web that people check several times a day, day in day out. Jimmy is a very engaging speaker and certainly someone that comes out to everyone with a powerful message on what is going around such emerging technologies as wikis, but by the end of the session I thought it was just such a great opportunity being missed just like that!

Here we have got Jimmy Wales talking to an audience who is already very very knowledgeable about Content, Information and Knowledge Management; who have been exposed to different various tools for a good number of years and who know most of the stuff of what Jimmy mentioned about Wikipedia and Wikia based on several other presentations they may have bumped into from other events. Yes, the slides are good for an educational perspective if you have never heard of Wikipedia, but who hasn’t?

This should have been the kind of keynote speaker session where Jimmy could have shown some real life experiences on what managing Wikipedia has been. The art of negotiating content through collaboration that will go into the site. The infrastructure and resources of volunteers in place, explain how the different ranks work and how they all operate. And, much importantly, share some of the stuff of what is going behind the scenes. How you can have several thousand editors editing content in Wikipedia coming from all sorts of different backgrounds, languages, cultures, customs, etc. etc. That is pure Information Management at its best and, much more importantly, the inherent aspects of managing people to do the right thing: having the right content made available to us all at the shortest time possible by the right people through a collaborative effort, i.e. how those connections get to flourish to then help boost the sharing of knowledge all over the place. Knowledge Management at its best, to say the least!

That is what I was expecting from Jimmy’s pitch that we never got to hear about. That would have gotten the audience much more engaged and asked multiple different questions about how wikis like Wikipedia and Wikia could be used as effective knowledge sharing and collaboration tools not just out there on the open Net, but also behind the firewall. I bet that, if he would have gone through that route in his presentation, he would have had a whole bunch more of questions and comments from people detailing their own experiences with Wikipedia, like Dave Snowden did. And also how Jimmy is moving along with Wikia, after whatever lessons learned from previous stories, we have all been exposed to already, he may have experienced and which we never heard anything from him on them, surprisingly, because I bet they would have been rather educational for us all.

Thus as you can see, I enjoyed the session from the perspective of being very informative and recommendable to everyone out there, if there is anyone still, who may not be familiar with wikis and with what Wikipedia has been able to achieve over time. However, I was also a bit disappointed that Jimmy lost a great opportunity to share with all of those KM advocates out there how wikis could shape up, for the better, the current workplace environment based on the experiences of what he has gone through already and help brake some of those barriers that people keep coming up with.

I hope that next time that I get to watch one of his speaker sessions it may be a bit more engaging than the one at the APQC KM & Innovation event, because somehow I felt afterwards exactly the same way as I felt before the session started. And that is not good. That, to me, is a major disappointment from what was supposed to be one of the main highlights of the event.

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, e2.0, Collaboration Technologies, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Social Networks, Communities, Learning, Social Media Today, Susan Scrupski, ITSinsider, Charlie Wood, Enterprise Irregulars, Tom Davenport, Andrew McAfee, Mindquarry, Twitter, Innovation

Yes, that is right, folks, the show is just about to start! Early next week, the conference event of events in the area of social computing within the corporate world will begin. And like I have mentioned not long ago, I will not be able to make it this time around (Last year either!). Bummer! But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I will not enjoy the conference just as much, while catching up with it remotely. I am sure that there would be plenty of folks out there who would be blogging about the different sessions, both the keynote and elective sessions. Taking a look into the fantastic agenda put together one can only drool all over about what people would be able to experience.

But it gets better. Through a hat-tip from Susan Scrupski, who has been blogging and twittering about it, we can now check out the schedule as well through Google Calendar and keep up to date, very easily, with what is going to happen during the event itself. Pretty nifty, indeed, and something that I know I will be using quite regularly throughout the week. It is going to be difficult to actually balance it all out between a regular working week and the event itself, but we shall see how it goes. Thanks ever so much, Susan and Charlie for sharing this handy piece of work with us! Excellent stuff!

So what am I going to miss while the event takes place? Well, as a starter, a whole bunch of the folks from the Social Media Today collective are going to be there and it would have been a superb opportunity to get to know them in real life after so many online interactions. I guess it will have to be next time. They are all going to get together and hang out and it would have been great finally being able to put a face behind their excellent blogging efforts. Sigh.

Another interesting event that I am going to miss during the conference, but that I am hoping to be able to catch up with remotely, is the Enterprise 2.0 lively gentleman’s debate between Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee, that has been going on for a little while already on the Internet and which I weblogged about myself not long as well sharing my two cents. I am really looking forward to checking it out as I would want to know how it will all end up. You can find a really good wrap up of the event at The Next Generation Enterprise Daily under the title "e2.0 Smackdown in Bean Town– Git’ch-Yer Tickets Here!". And one of the latest updates over here with all of the necessary details. It promises to be quite an interesting debate, I tell you.

Finally, apart from the superb keynote and elective sessions throughout the entire event at the Enterprise 2.0 conference starting next week, there is also something else that I will be missing about the whole thing. And that is a good bunch of different product announcements from several different companies on how they are bringing social computing into the Enterprise with a whole bunch of innovative applications taking place in this space. Gosh, I am surely going to miss seeing some of those. As an example, take a look into Mindquarry, an "Open Source collaborative software platform for file sharing (documents, images, media files, etc.), task and project management, team collaboration and Wiki editing that meshes simplicity and functionality". Don’t tell me that it is not an exciting event to be at! By the way, I will be sharing some further details around Mindquarry as time goes by… Stay tuned!

As I said, it is quite disappointing that I will not be able to make it at the Enterprise 2.0 conference (Need to do something about it for next year’s) this time around, but I am surely glad that in such a connected world as today I would have the opportunity to catch up with most of it and get lots of different impressions from the folks who are going to make it to the event next week. And on top of that there is … Twitter!!

Have a good one, folks!

Tags: APQC, APQC2007, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, KM Events, Innovation, KM Training, KM Learning, Communities, Communities of Practice, CoPs, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, KM 2.0, Houston, Carla O’Dell, Relationships, Social Networks, Trust, Social Capital, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Lessons Learned, Informal Communities

After the few days break sharing my thoughts over here, having attended the APQC Knowledge Management and Innovation event in Houston, I thought it would be a good opportunity to again pick up the subject and continue to share with you folks some of the experiences I went through while attending the two day event. If you would remember, the last weblog post that I created was on the keynote session that Carla O’Dell did around the subject of The Role of Knowledge Management in Innovation.

Back then, I finished off mentioning how crucial and important the role of communities has been all along in helping boost collaboration and knowledge sharing amongst knowledge workers, which, as a result, would help drive innovation further. Very strong and powerful messages, indeed, from Carla, but I am going to stop here for a minute as I feel that she surely hit the nail on the head when stressing out how important communities are for collaboration to help drive that innovation.

Yes, indeed, collaboration through communities is key and here you have got the three main bullets  that Carla shared to demonstrate it:

"1. Collaboration is the fountain of innovation. Global companies report that more profitable new ideas come from the boundaries -partners, suppliers and customers.

2. Innovation cannot happen without an explicit process to enable knowledge sharing, integration and insights -linked explicitly to an innovation "receptor".

3. Communities of practice can be structured to enable innovation -or the principles can be applied to innovation processed and issues."

After going through this, Carla showed as well why communities are so important and I guess that instead of me detailing why they would be I am just going to include them over here as well so that you, too, can go through them:

"1. "The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate" (Thomas Watson, Sr.) Corollary: and learn from it.

2. Experts identify "gaps" between current practices and best practices in respective business processes

3. Document successful practices for others to use

4. Support and enhance a knowledge-sharing culture.

5. Speed rate of innovation by linking appropriate groups to diverse bodies of knowledge and expertise."

Those are surely very good points, I am not going to deny them. I think Carla is just so spot on. However, I am not sure it would be the complete picture, and the main reason being two different key factors that are part of most of the different communities that keep emerging over the last few years:

- Firstly, just as communities are very good at capturing good practices, they are equally impressive at collecting lessons learned on what may have gone wrong and, as a result of it, become much more knowledgeable for the next time. Because after all, whether we like it or not, we have a tendency to learn a whole lot more from what goes wrong than from what goes right. That is just how our brain works. And, like I said, communities seem to be very good at handling those painful experiences, get the most out of them and re-use those knowledge snippets for a later time to help address similar situations and overcome them successfully next time around. And they will always do.

- And, secondly, most of the stuff I have tried to reproduce in here has got a very strong flavour of how formal communities tend to operate. However, we should not ignore, nor neglect, that perhaps the communities that manage to drive innovation the furthest are those with a very informal flavour, mainly because the different community members are driving their motivation to share, collaborate and innovate due to their passion for that particular topic. They do not care much about processes, structures, hierarchies or whatever else. They just hang out together, drive on their passion for that subject and they keep innovating as a result of that collaboration.

If you take a look into it that is how most of the communities out there on the Internet in this space of social computing have been operating all along and how they will continue to operate. So, in a way, that informal nature of those communities is provoked by their usage of social software and in reality it is that particular usage that helps them innovate further in the community space.

Thus, as you would be able to see, Carla touched base on some of the key fundamental aspects of how communities can help boost the sharing of knowledge and collaboration so that knowledge workers have got the opportunity to keep innovating. However, for that to happen we need to ensure that communities keep that informal flavour as much as they can possibly do at the same time that they would try to combine what has worked with what hasn’t. Focusing on best practices is just no longer good enough.

Finally, from there onwards Carla touched base on something that I have been stressing myself for a number of years and which plenty of people seem to underestimate as it may not have much to do with a business environment nor provide much business value, according to some: social capital. Yes, indeed, social capital, over the course of the next few years, will not only become a very empowering and essential skill, but will also help drive the next wave of interactions in the current business environment where the boundaries between work and personal, work and play, are more blurred than ever before.

And that is what communities can help achieve: a comfortable level of social capital skills, amongst several others, thanks to, amongst other things, the extensive usage and adoption of social computing within the enterprise. So who said again that social computing does not drive innovation? Who said again that communities do not have a degree of importance within the business world to drive such innovation? Well, think again!