Generally, overdoing anything is not good. For example, humans have to drink water to survive, however, if one drinks way too much, the water would wash away the nutrients in the body and its bad for one’s health. Collaboration is the same. Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies promotes collaboration across groups of people and there has been alot of buzz about it.
My experience with such implementation is that many leaders do not know when to collaborate and when not to. One classic example is when teams can’t decide on a specific problem or find the best route of advancement. I do not think the relationship works this way – the more people collaborating, the better result is achieved. Just like a 2 hour meeting with 20 people in the room is generally a waste of time. Leaders must target collaboration strategically.
Collaboration takes time and effort of employees and teams and this translates to opportunity cost. Employees from both sides of the team could have spend doing something more useful. The exact time spent on collaborating could be translated to a cost (based on salary of employees). Employers needs to ensure that employees are using their time effectively and help their organisation make money.
Collaboration between teams also cost money. There is a cost for the technology platform, telephone calls, traveling to other sites and so on. These costs should not be under estimated – small amounts can roll up to be a substantial amount.
Based on this, the returns of a collaboration arrangement between teams should be greater than the sum of opportunity costs + collaboration costs.
Returns on collaboration > opportunity costs + collaboration costs
If a collaboration arrangement does not fulfill this model, then it would be better to stay status quo or find another way to maximise the returns on other investments.
I just finished an introductory Enterprise 2.0 lecture with approximately 80 undergraduate students at The University of Melbourne. I asked a question to the class at the end of the lesson – Would prefer to work with an organisation with or without these tools?
The response were as follows:
1) An organisation with these tools – approx 75% of students raised their hands
2) An organisation without these tool – no one raised their hands
I guess just this simple 1 minute survey with the future of working generation says alot about what organisations need to do to improve their internal systems.
Having being part of an Enterprise 2.0 implementation, I soon found out that collaboration and communication is awesome. My efficiency is way through the roof and I can accomplish more within a day. However, what I also found is that when I am faster and more efficient, I was taking in alot more information and processing more tasks within the same day. Technology could help deliver the right information to me when required but I can only do that much within a day. I can only process a certain amount of information a day and complete that many tasks (tasks that requires brain and decision making functions).
Where is the future for Enterprise 2.0? Once organisations embrace this technologies, are we at the peak of human collaboration, communication and sharing?
Some might contest that artificial intelligence and agents could help to deliver even higher capabilities, but AI has been a concept for over 20 odd years and nothing really concrete has emerged. Even Business Intelligence nowadays is dependent on the reports and analytics we design and implement into the production system. AI has still some distance to cover before it can be commercially viable.
What I am trying to say here is that as employees are becoming more efficient with the help of technology like Enterprise 2.0, BI and things like that we are bounded to the fact that we can only do that much a day. Are we reaching a point where humans are at the most efficient and there is not much more room to grow?
With the recent economy crisis, many universities are facing a huge drop in thier funding from corporate organisations and layoffs is somewhat common. In the most recent event, even Harvard is facing a tough time. Having spent alot of time in universities, I have found that many of the ideas I discuss with my professors years ago are becoming an industry trend now and first movers have become rich and famous. There’s money to be made.
When I was in University, and no offence to my Alma Mater, I did some really silly projects that had absolutely no value (financial or educational). Considering that most universities groom the future talents in their space and having many thousands of them on campus, I am pretty sure we can do something to optimise the usage of the brain power that is lying around. Not just from the professors or PhD holders but also from the young and energetic students. There is wisdom and knowledge in universities and there is also a huge crowd!
By leveraging this knowledge and the power of crowds, Universities could set up successful startups and once it starts making money, the money could then be fed back into the university as extra funding and benefit both the students and employees. As far as I know, Univeristies have been doing this and even some employees have came out on their own and implemented their own great ideas. Since this is the case why not make it bigger and better?
We have heard of various resistance stories when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 / collaboration initiatives. There are also many blog posts regarding this topic. Today, I would like to approach this topic from an academic perspective.
There are three key reasons why people resist changes in technology.
1) Internal factors to the person or group – where it targets reactions like “People resist all change; People with analytic cognitive styles accept systems; while intuitive thinkers resist them”
2) Application or technical factors – if its a crappy system, people will resist it.
3) Interaction factors – where the new application or system would change the balance of power in organisations and people who are threaten by it would resist it.
In the Enterprise 2.0 world, I believe that all three factors can cause resistance but I feel that the third factor is probably the most problematic factor. How can we go about managing this?
First of all, I apologize that I have been quiet for almost a month. Some unpleasant things happened and I had to attend to them.
I have been having alot of chats with various parties on collaboration and its really funny how this buzzword has a different meaning to different people. First up, there is no way you can implement a platform and tell people to “collaborate”. A successful collaboration platform is very difficult to achieve however, its failure is generally not well publicised as collaboration platforms generally starts of as a pilot and if it fails, its canned. No pain to the company at all, few thousands dollars went down the drain but a lesson well learnt.
Collaboration is a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship entered into by two or more parties to achieve common goals. The relationship includes a commitment to mutual relationships and goals; a jointly developed structure and shared responsibility; mutual authority and accountability for success; and sharing of resources and rewards. With this, collaboration is not just technological platform – its just a means to an end.
Interesting enough that one of my close colleague and friend brought up the case that alot of collaboration platforms have failed and its unable to engage the community. This is due to the lack of understanding of the concepts and a overly strong focus on the technology. Technology is important, but just like building ERP solutions and SCM solutions, requirements must be understood! Business culture must be understood! Human behaviour must be understood! Personally, I feel that understanding the specific requirements of collaboration is extremely difficult as its not just the business needs but the individual needs and fit into the overall culture and environment.
Sometimes, collaboration might not be the best option and even if its the best option, we need to understand why various parties would like to participate. Freak success stories like Wikipedia is not going to happen again. That is a Excellent success story but you can create another Wikipedia now and expect it to work with the same success rate. We need to understand the incentives for each party, the responsibilities of each party and many other minor details.
I have reviewed the Enterprise 2.0 implementation success factors post I wrote a while back and I still think the model is extremely very valid. I hope this will help improve the success rates of collaboration platforms across the world.
I have previously thought that these two concepts do not sit well together as Enterprise 2.0 is freeform and allows users to do as they please. In the world wide web, this could work as there are so many people out there fixing up things that are not right on Wikipedia. However, within an organisation resources are scare and time is money. Organisations do not have the luxury of having a huge army of editors internally to fix up and garden the Enterprise 2.0 platform. If this is a problem, what is the solution?
I personally believe that BPM (Business Process Management) could play a role in this. I am not saying that free-formness should be thrown out of the window. What I am saying is that some levels of BPM could help to improve the quality of the information and data on the platform. The processes involved should enable and not restrict people from editing and creating content. I believe it should be light weight and adaptable to any kind of content as well.
What I envisage is as follows:
1) Generic template for all content created.
2) Content review over time and updates
3) Usage of links and data from other sources
4) Workflows in teams and projects to ensure up to date information
5) Overall manager for each work space and would be held accountable for the space
Does all these make sense? Please let me know your thoughts.
I have been pretty quiet over the past few weeks as I have been preparing my paper for submission to ICIS’09. Its titled “Analyzing the Business Benefits Potential of Enterprise 2.0″. In a nutshell, the aim of this paper is to identify suitable theories which could be used to analyze the potential benefits that Enterprise 2.0 applications hold for organizations.
When I first embarked on this journey to write this paper (by the way, I rewrote this paper 4 times from scratch), I felt I knew all the benefits and just had to link it to theories. I was wrong… extremely wrong. I felt the full force of rigorous academic research and I was pretty blown away. Everything had an explanation, a cause and effect and ultimately a reference. Even though I have completed a few academic papers previously, it wasn’t the same. The research areas that I discussed were well establish areas and it wasn’t difficult to find information to support my reasoning. There were much material ready for me to be used. But in the case of Enterprise 2.0, there was almost nothing!
In this paper, I listed the common Enterprise 2.0 benefits as discussed industry experts and from case studies. I then went on to find an explanation and support for these benefits. If there are any theories that could explain it better and use it as a framework to analyze the potential benefits.
It was an extremely enriching experience and I totally hooked onto understanding Enterprise 2.0 not based on buzz terms and hype. I will share the paper with everyone shortly.
This is the description of Attribution Error from Wikipedia
Attributional biases typically take the form of actor/observer differences: people involved in an action (actors) view things differently from people not involved (observers). These discrepancies are often caused by asymmetries in availability (frequently called “salience” in this context). For example, the behavior of an actor is easier to remember (and therefore more available for later consideration) than the setting in which he found himself; and a person’s own inner turmoil is more available to himself than it is to someone else. As a result, our judgments of attribution are often distorted along those lines.
Within a group, this could be in a similar case as well, when the group collectively have a view of the world in a certain way which creates a bias during decision making time. This could lead to groups making less than optimal decisions. Groups could also based on their collective benefits, make decisions in order to benefit themselves.
I am no expert in this area and I have to spend more time understanding the details of this theory. What do you think? Enterprise 2.0, wisdom of crowds and collective intelligence aims to help groups make better decisions. However, attribution errors might explain why some groups can’t make correct decisions. How can we prevent this problem? Can Enterprise 2.0 solve this issue?
G'day, Sean here. I am a senior consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and also a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and my proposed thesis title is "Implementation of Enterprise 2.0 and its Value in Organizations"
This blog is dedicated to topics surrounding Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, and IT strategies for organizations with the aim of increasing efficiency, increasing profits and reducing costs. Hope you enjoy this blog.
Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer's and/or University of Melbourne's positions, strategies or opinions. I have not been compensated in any way for the content.
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