Open Business – From Document-Centric to People-Centric Collaboration

3 thoughts on “Open Business – From Document-Centric to People-Centric Collaboration”

  1. Thank you Luis for posting these great thoughts. My latest experience is that by the time something is documented (even if it has been well thought and peer reviewed) it is already obsolete… One should be open for continuous enhancements and improvements… and in the end we build together the future by our undocumented “experience”. So, I would see the future as “facilitating the right conversations” which realizes the “conversation is the work”. The inititial difficulty I see here is to convince superiors that this is the work… Any ideas on this?
    PS 1: avoid endless and pointless power-showing business meetings
    PS 2: there are cases that documenting is a must e.g. next generations shall avoid remaking our mistakes…

    1. Hi Aristeidis, much appreciated the kind feedback comments and thanks for dropping by! Oh, gosh, absolutely spot on with this remark > “ One should be open for continuous enhancements and improvements“. In fact, one of the main KM principles from way way back (circa 18 years) is that the moment you hit *Publish* on whatever the piece of content you may be trying to share across, the moment that piece is out of date, obsolete and antiquated. Just like that!

      I think the convincing to executives needs to come from having them on board from that same user experience of focusing on the conversations vs. the .PPTs. What’s happening is that they are perhaps a bit too comfortable in their own spaces consuming those .PPTs where they would require little work / effort, whereas in a conversation there is a whole lot more to build on, based on how to keep it up, draw the business value, iterate and relate it to work items.

      PS 1 sounds like a plan and I am actually working on that one myself. I am putting together a blog post where I am sharing how social networks do help reduce quite dramatically the time you spend on meetings, so that would be helpful to share across. Hoping to do so soon enough!

      On PS 2. true, don’t take me wrong, we have a need to document, but what what I am after is reducing the frictions, the countless ones, of having to handle attachments, when that documentation can happen through wikis, blogs, microblogs, social bookmarks, activities and what not… That’s where we need to aim at the moment… Break down the silo created by the document and free up the information through these digital tools.

      It’s about time that we challenge the status quo of documents and instead embrace open knowledge sharing and collaboration.

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