There’s been a lot of noise about online collaboration tools / Enterprise 2.0 / Knowledge Management, and we have seen a lot of products in the space. There are players ranging from the traditional Enterprise tools vendors like IBM and Microsoft with all encompassing heavy products, to a bunch of start-ups with their wares trying to get a share of the pie by solving a piece of the problem. The following is a list of a few tools in the Enterprise 2.0 space:
Sharepoint by Microsoft
Lotus Connections by IBM
SocialText (A ‘social wiki’ wiki with sharepoint integration)
ConnectBeam (Social Bookmarking that integrates with search)
Atlassian (Enterprise wiki with a lot of social features)
and many others
While Sharepoint is a last generation tool in its AJAX-y avatar, IBM’s product and those by the start-ups are true blue web 2.0 products which supposedly adhere to the web2.0 tenets of openness, sharing and usability and attemp to bring them to how people collaborate at workplaces. Such a tool can, potentially, help an enterprise:
1. Unlock knowledge hidden in day to day interactions
2. Make knowledge available for later use which would otherwise have been lost
3. Discover people with expertise
4. Promote retention, cohesion within the work place
While the potential use cases of these tools are very interesting, enterprise wide adoption and utility is something that I think is still to be proven. I would really like the inputs from the community here about their experience with using these or similar tools. Maybe we can have the discussion around the following points:
1. Which tool have you tried, and what have been the benefits.
2. How has the adoption been? How keen are employees to leave their previous ways of interacting, and shift to these collaboration tools?
3. Do you have a wish-list of features that you would like to see in a collaboration tool for your workplace?
And of course, anything else that you might want to add.
- CC is Evil - June 24, 2011
- Launching GrexIt – Your shared email memory - August 17, 2010
- Enterprise Collaboration tools: Adoption and Benefits? - December 10, 2008
There are definitely many use cases for Enterprise collaboration tools. We are seeing increasing adoption of our team-ware product at Injoos in the SMB segment. Please checkout http://www.injoos.com for details.
About Injoos: Injoos Team-ware is a next generation collaboration platform that combines the simplicity and UGC features of social networks with the power of enterprise document, project and knowledge management tools in a single, hosted web based application.
Hi Raghu,
Nice inputs about adoption.
Another thing that I think can aid adoption is clearly defined use cases. So, a wiki inside a company is a hazy idea, while a wiki that has some specific features which helps writing and managing functional specs can have clear utility and adoption.
I think there are many integration points for these tools with ‘conventional’ communication which need to be put in place. Making sure that meeting agendas, meeting minutes, tips and tricks to get technical problems solved etc. go into these collaboration tools can ensure a lot of people start using them.
Clearly defined use cases, maybe even custom made for different verticals, might be the clincher here. Just my two cents.
interesting insights.
1. for a business focussed group – a collaborative platform is an unstated boon. it’s the central moderation that’s deeneregising to natural adoption. as for effort, a third-generation portal like ning makes it downright easy. it’s the content that drives adoption..
2. in intranets, getting the monthly salary and interfacing with the hr/admin/finance functions is incentive enough
3. to promote the understanding of the network-effect – allowing the freedom to vocate and creating user administered personal-interest-centric groupings is fundamental. decentralize the central authority in a controlled manner. ning satisfies that criteria.
i rember from a decade in hughes, how some of my super enterprising friends finally took sanction to create discussion lists on lotus notes – the hottest and longest running of them were junk and techtalk, apart from the hr driven forms for office use that were bare necessities and regularly used
I’d like to talk only abt the adoption part. We run http://www.ibranch.in thru which any organization can have its official intra-org portal for day-to-day internal collaboration as a subscribed service. Presently we are focusing on higher education domain so basically we are selling intra college portals.
One of our core business processes is “Evangelizing” which is all abt hand-holding, training/motivating the college management, teachers & students to share their day-to-day notices, class-notes, discussions & knowledge through their intra college portal.
There are some very practical insights that we have gained regarding adoption issue:
1. it takes time (and some efforts from you) for each and every member of the org to realize that now they have an official collaborative platform, so no need to use orkut communities, yahoo/google groups or bulk emailing etc. (but once they do realize, u better keep the service running :))
2. don’t incentivize the user-activity (eg. best forum reply gets blah-blah) in the 1st phase of evangelizing… its very counter-productive in long run because you won’t grasp the awareness/readiness level of the org. do the straight talking to end-users and simply tell them the benefits.
3. understand the ways in which network-effect can be invoked in the organization. for the current discussion its GOD for us!
think marc andreessen. ning.com
create your own network, everything facebook has with better customization, wiki, newsgroup forums, import flickr, the usual applications, and more. share documents with box.net. engineer your own locally hosted intranet in <48 hours for peanuts. for example, https://engineering.purdue.edu/Intranet/Portal/College
bin around for a year now, facebook wins socially due to it’s sheer connection history of existing subscribers that facilitates lifecycle management of ‘groups’ that much easier.