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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 incoming information.
Five elements of Lotus Connections are available now: Profiles, Activities, Communi-ties, Blogs, and Dogear (a.k.a. social bookmarking). All of the Lotus Connections elements are loosely coupled and can be used independently or together through a Web 2.0 user interface. They can also be accessed via the Atom protocol, which allows end-users to compose their client-side environment1 to match the way they work. There are people for whom Activities best meets their job needs and others for whom Communities is the hitching post, by which they orient their workday. Others will be happy with Profiles as a place to start. Researchers and analysts may feel that Dogear, the environment of shared bookmarks, gives an array of information sources, pre-qualified in the context of the business, that is to die for.
Lotus Connections can be extended with the use of two related products, Lotus Sametime and Lotus Quickr.2 Sametime complements Lotus Connections with Instant Messaging/ Web Conferencing. Quickr provides teaming software that has a repository with more control features and connectivity to other enterprise systems than Lotus Connections’ Activities and Communities provide. Together, these soft-ware elements can revitalize a work environ-ment, replacing the cloying inefficiency of email with tools and environments with varying depths of control, all focused on facilitating “can-do” operations.
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