The productivity and bottom line of most businesses have benefited greatly from the increasing pace and pervasiveness of technological support. In the process, the community that characterizes and supports businesses of all sizes has been given short shrift. In this Clipper Group paper, read about IBM Lotus connections, the tool that will help your team to collaborate as efficiently as possible.
Lotus Connections Reinvigorates the Community of Business THE CLIPPER GROUP
TM
SM SMCaptain's Log Navigating Information Technology HorizonsPublished Since 2001 Report #TCG2007068RLI June 8, 2007
Lotus Connections Reinvigorates
the Community of Business
Analyst: Anne MacFarland The productivity and bottom line of most businesses have benefited greatly from the increasing pace and pervasiveness of technological support. In the process, the community that characterizes and supports businesses of all sizes has been given short shrift. Factors underlying this lack of community support in business include: . the modularization of business, . the move from internal development to a strategy of partnering and acquisition, . the consequent mismatches of culture and expectations, . job-hopping as the best route to broad experience and significant success, . the rapid pace of change and frequent tweaks (if not outright disruptions) of business models, and . the geographic dispersal of most large organizations. These days, if you collaborate only with those you know, your scope will be too narrow. Expanding beyond the scope of whom you know is difficult. This is not to say that there are no tools to foster communication and participation. If participation is measured in e-mails, we are certainly participating more - but in a very inefficient manner. What enterprises need is the kind of intellectual "public commons" that used to be a natural part of organizations when money and time were more plentiful. Such a commons is anchored in the full context of the business, not some outsider's idea of it. It is best created by those active in the business - employees, partners, and other stakeholders. Over time, it persists, grows, and evolves. Anyone could use this commons to find the expertise needed to be fully productive. It would also probably be a well-controlled and secured asset. You don't want some service provider mining this commons for insights. One of the easiest and most effective ways of aggregating this highly relevant knowledge is by fostering the wide adoption of the habit of tagging documents with contextual and other key words. By enabling organizationally-specific tagging of activities, communities, documents, and other kinds of information via bookmarks, a group of people (the larger the better) build an enterprise glossary of relevant terms. These terms can be accessed, explored, and expanded by a variety of tools (dashboards, templates, unified communications capabilities) and vehicles (blogs, wikis, whiteboards, activities). With tagging, better-targeted collaboration and communities can be supported. As the product of a known community, in a secure space, audits tell who assigned the tags, which keeps things civilized. IBM Lotus, building on its long collaborative heritage, has created a set of integrated capabilities called Lotus Connections. Lotus Connections uses tagging and the concept of a commons to build repositories of organizational knowledge, and provides the integrated tools to leverage the lore. In the process, Lotus Connections' links people to single instances of information - something that can reduce the blizzard of information that besets inboxes and file systems. It provides a setting where individuals and groups can contribute and find expertise and build collaborations using it. This recaptures the business effectiveness that has been hampered by the pace of business change and the blizzard of ‹The Clipper Group, Inc. - Technology Acquisition Consultants Strategic Advisors ‹ ‹ ‹ ‹ ‹888 Worcester Street Suite 140 Wellesley, Massachusetts 02482 U.S.A. 781-235-0085 781-235-5454 FAX ‹Visit Clipper at www.clipper.com Send comments to editor@clipper.com TMJune 12, 2007 The Clipper Group Captain's Log Page 2
incoming information. Five elements of Lotus Connections are nesses, please read on. available now: Profiles, Activities, Communi-ties, Blogs, and Dogear (a.k.a. social Exposing Institutional Expertise bookmarking). All of the Lotus Connections Businesses leverage publicly available infor-elements are loosely coupled and can be used mation as a matter of course, but they can really indepe... [download for more]
