Building an Infrastructure for Collaboration
Social networking sites are all over the news, both for their number of users and the potential for revenue that seems to sprout out of sites like MySpace and Facebook. MySpace just broke 200 million users, and Facebook is quickly becoming the place to be for business, eclipsing such grounded places as LinkedIn and Plaxo.
Initiating collaboration within firms
I chose the term “pyramid communication” because each of the sites mentioned allows you to find other people, usually through something easy like importing your contacts from another location. In addition, as you communicate you broadcast to multiple people, who can all contribute back to your conversation. It’s a viral model of spread, and in my eyes looks like multi level marketing – the more friends you find, the larger your network! In business, this is still a valid thought, but needs to be more selective in the choice of peers for communication.
Intra-firm communication can benefit from an open communications system that may capture corporate memory that is being lost each and every day. With an aging partner pool in the accounting industry, succession planning should not just include the transfer of business, but the successful transfer of knowledge from the people getting ready to retire. In addition, developing strategies for capturing corporate memory can have implications for records retention and management that go beyond just making sure that legal standards have been met.
Think about the “pyramid communication scheme” above. Getting people in your firm connected by invitation to virtual conversations may be a way to draw information out of normal non-contributors. It encourages people to ask online what they may not be able to ask in person, and gives a location to collect and store this information. Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 and Lotus Notes and Domino 8 both include just such tools, and are valuable additions to collecting the information that can fall through the cracks in email, or are lost in the vertical software specifically geared to accounting.
In addition, there are a number of other tools that can serve as the “mega water cooler” that can track conversations that would fall outside of normal need to know circles. In many senses, this type of system needs to be open and allow users to decide what should and shouldn’t be posted. +
One of the largest anti water cooler objections to business I heard at the Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies regarding opening up a system to all employees was the “need to know” factor. How can you prevent people from getting into things they shouldn’t get in to, or prevent something from being posted that shouldn’t be? The answer from all of the speakers in one session on Social Computing in the Enterprise was that people do their jobs first, and giving them a system that lets them do their jobs more effectively far outweighed the risk. In addition, Asheesh Birla from Thomson mentioned that people were too busy getting their work done and had enough passion about their jobs that snooping and mishandled information were almost non issues.
And finally, “what can I gain from this”. Collaboration systems, if properly opened to use, can be excellent locations for the partners/owners of firms to get real information about their firms that would not be accessible otherwise. Using a collection system, even something as simple as a base wiki, can increase the transfer of knowledge up as well as down the leadership hierarchy. People down the chain can often get faster responses from the people who have an investment in the project being discussed, and there is a record of what happened for reference.
Deciding how and what to share
In an extra-firm collaboration system, there is a huge question of secrets. How can you share enough to make your contribution valuable to others as well as receiving quality feedback without sacrificing core business to competitors? It comes down to an analogy I bring from the open source arena – core versus context.
The core of what you do is your clients, your specialized business track, and the data surrounding each. The context of what you do relates to the infrastructure in place to get these pieces done. Internal Technology, Human Capital, and Learning & Training are just three areas where the collective knowledge and sharing of your peers can make the whole firm run more cleanly.
Some of our greatest insights here at Boomer Consulting have resulted from just such discussions. In person, they happen at the Boomer Technology Circles™, during the Performance3™ Management Program and the Human Capital & Learning Symposium. Bringing these communities together to share knowledge and increase productivity & effectiveness is critical to improving the knowledge of all.
The Boomer Knowledge Network is our commitment to bringing such collaboration into a social network that can benefit each firm involved, with highly qualified individuals committing knowledge that can enhance the infrastructure of participating firms. Look for more information on the BKN in next month’s Boomer Bulletin. We believe you will see the value of collaboration, and join us for the journey.