Thoughts

In his article in Smashing Magazine, Rian van der Merwe reminds us that collaboration is our job as well as any other’s job. “It only works if everyone in the organization is open about their processes and workflows, without fear of being judged unfairly.”

Why improving collaboration matters at all? According to her experience Jem Janik states that “improved employee collaboration does help a company achieve its goals”. In CMS Wire she writes about setting measurable business goals as “the first step towards a successful community”. Her advice is to start with your company strategy as well as consider what’s not working today with reversing those realities as your objectives.

According to Dr. Graham Hill “companies need to develop their collaborative capabilities before implementing collaboration tools”. In his guest post, hosted by ZD Net author Michael Krigsman he presents “Ten principles for effective collaboration” concluding that technology can be an enormous help if it really fits the style of collaboration that has already been developed.

When it comes to implementing social collaboration platform in the enterprise IT professionals are challenged by a new role. The Brainyard Columnist Debra Donston-Miller sees social networking in the enterprise as “a particularly challenging technology nut for IT to crack because so much of it can and does exist outside of the IT department’s orbit.” IT department should take the lead “during the process of planning, implementing, maintaining and even extending organizations’ social collaboration platforms and presence”.

“Social collaboration is a culture that companies have to develop in order to become leaders in dynamic business environment. Without the culture, collaboration tools and platforms interfere with the workflow. In Flowr, we would like to overcome that. We are developing a solution that will encourage teams to recognize the potential of collaboration and will develop their social collaborative skills hands-on,” Davorin Gabrovec, CEO Flowr comments on the issue.

We assembled a team of seven expert guild leaders to observe collaboration and leadership in the games and extract generalizations about why and how groups in the games succeed. Their conclusion? It’s about the environment more than the players. The places where collaboration happens and the processes by which it’s managed are more important than the innate capabilities of the people participating. When asked about the most important implication of that conclusion for serious work, a guild leader comment was: “Change the game, not the people.”

Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete

Your environment is much more then just desks and software. While they’re both important you have to ask yourself about the collaboration style in your office. Rewarding only top achievers leads into promoting information hoarding instead of fostering an open environment. Try to acknowledge good examples of open knowledge sharing and constructive debates.

Does your collaboration tool support this way of thinking?

When we talk about enterprise collaboration people often think of email, intranets and wikis. But our experience tells us that these tools are not always welcomed with open hands. Old Intranet solutions were pushed down from management and did not cache up. Wiki’s were an attempt where companies tried to give “power” to employees directly, often failed because of usage complexity.

In personal lives, people are increasingly turning away from e-mail as their communication tool towards social networks. Facebook has proven that microblogging in form of status updates, private messages is much easier and attractive when used in our everyday lives.

As modern enterprises move towards decentralised work units with teleworking and employees on the go, it’s time to re-examine how we do business. E-mail is one of the most cited reasons for lost productivity, closely followed by meetings.

While some enterprises are trying to optimise their e-mail usage, others are learning from emerging technologies in consumer markets. Facebook has shown us that next generation of social interaction will come in a form of intelligent news stream of status updates. Receiving highly relevant information from social graphs with ability to comment, share and promote items present highly engaging and personalised experience, which in turn means more interaction and engagement from users. Businesses that embrace this in their DNA will be more agile and have better turn-around time than the competition, that is still using previous generation of tools and processes.

Few weeks ago I’ve read Morten’s post about lack of informational stream in a typical company as it strongly resonated with my experience from a small company where I’ve worked before. Basically no one outside development or sales team knew what’s really happening on a daily basis. We were a company with 20 employees so you can just imagine how it’s with even larger groups. Regular Monday meetings or monthly meetings didn’t enable day to day information flow and this lead me to think about how we can improve the flow of  information.

Just imagine, on Facebook, you know what your friends are doing (even when she is not a close friend). Why can’t we give our employees the same functionality to share their thoughts, problems or ideas and help them with your opinion, thoughts, experiences etc. Using that approach we will definitely improve our collaboration and information flow, improve efficiency and enable information sharing inside organization.

We are on the way to change an Industry that has been locked down by traditional legacy systems, because we can not imagine Facebook population will be satisfied with old legacy tools, since they know they can be much more productive and efficient when given opportunity to use the tools that they already know.

Seth Godin describes in his book Tribes that one of the problems with old type of organizations is that communication happens top-down or bottom up but not sideways: between coworkers and team members. It’s easy to write a memo to your boss and wait a month or so for a response and hoping that your ideas might happen at some point in the future.

Here at Flowr we think that there is a better way to work together. We talk a lot about Real-Time Collaboration which is one of the ways for an organization to encourage talking sideways. Encouraging everyone to share as much as they can and to share their progress, ideas and ask questions out in the open is a basic building block of new type of organization. One that then takes this knowledge and empowers its workers with tools analyze ideas and connect with each other. The biggest changes come from people from different departments that are passionate about similar ideas and have not discovered that they can form their own tribe around it.

It’s not about technology but about building tools that empower you to work together at creating new, bigger ideas that might never happen otherwise.