Electronic Collaboration

Wikis, blogs, social networking….you’ve heard of these things but aren’t quite sure what value they have in a business context. After all, Web 2.0 is the next big thing and will solve all of your collaboration needs and cut your travel budget by 90%.

Most organizations approach the new tools from a technology-centric point of view. What isn’t often taken into consideration are two other factors that are far more important than technology:

1. Your overall collaboration strategy within the organization
2. The cultural aspects of your organization.

Each of these things will be unique to your organization so there is no cookie-cutter answer to what is the best approach for you.

Further, as successful as Web 2.0 is, Enterprise 2.0 is NOT the same thing. Some of the tools are the same but context is everything in this case. In evaluating the possibility of implementing things such as a company wiki or blogging platform you have to consider the business rationale behind it. One has to think of the business problem you’re trying to solve. Will the tools help? Is there a larger collaboration strategy into which Enterprise 2.0 tools will fit? Do our people have incentive to collaborate or are they being rewarded for holding information close to the vest?

Omakase Group can examine all of these factors within an organization and then make recommendations on developing business cases for implementing the right mix of collaborative tools for your organization. We take a hard business approach and as facilitators and collaborators we understand the skills and programs required to motivate people to use the tools to their maximum effectiveness. We know how to measure the success of the tools and how to roll them out and govern them.

Case Study: Bell Canada

While at Bell Canada I worked with a team of collaborators and technologists to develop a web-based internal social application to help people in the company ask their business questions to the company at large, outside the normal chain of command. The application, called Just Ask, used a combination of back end intelligence and active user input (completing profiles using key words) to direct the questions to the appropriate people within the company via email notification or RSS.

The pilot program was rolled out to over 4,000 participants who engaged in a six week trial. Highlights of the trial included:

• Hundreds of questions asked with over 90% answered.
• 76% of questions answered in less than 48 hours.
• 16% of participants received answers to questions in less than 5 hours.

An important point of this case is that to build this pilot we had input from human resources, corporate communications, technology development and product managers. We had to collaboratively build a tool that fit into the workflow of the organization, met the needs of various stakeholders and did not exist in isolation from the rest of the business. And once it was built we had to convince senior management of the business value of committing further resources to a full a scale roll-out. We did that by doing comprehensive surveying using our market research department, gathering qualitative and quantitative data. We also made a movie inspired by Lee and Sachi at Common Craft in order to tell the story of what Just Ask could be.

Previous social enterprise initiatives at Bell Canada were highlighted in the book Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.