Although the post is already a year old, I only encountered the Enterprise Collaboration Maturity Model by Nathan Wallace this week. It captures quite nicely the journey we often see happening. The model is based on the notion that knowledge work is either individual or group based, and it is always performed in an individual, shared or open environment. The Enterprise Collaboration Maturity Model depicts these work modes, and argues that there is a logical journey that people in an enterprises take to reach each stage.

As Nathan argues, successful Enterprise 2.0 style collaboration requires both technical and cultural maturity. Also from my own experiences, I know that cultural maturity is usually the biggest hurdle: it takes bravery and trust to take a discussion to a shared space or even to an open space.

Therefore, we also perform personality tests during our pilots in Future Workspaces. We are testing a hypothesis that personality is an important factor that determines what workspace fits a person. (According to our hypotheses, other main factors are a person’s activities and personal working style.)

This would mean that for some people blogging or contributing to a wiki is a more natural way of working then for other people. However, even if personality is an important factor, this does not mean that you are “stuck” in a specific state, determined by your personality. I believe that in a culture of mutual trust and with appropriate support (starting small, sharing good practices, showing success stories, talking about things that are scary), people can learn to share more (intermediate) thoughts in an open space.

To lower the threshold for sharing in a shared space or in an open space, I combine two main approaches:

1. Help them find opportunities to embed this sharing as part of normal work processes: if they are used to creating a document with intermediate findings while searching for information on topic Y, why not put that information in a wiki page? Moreover, this may speed up the search process, as others may contribute as well.
2. Explain that sharing thoughts in a blog or in a wiki is not about sharing final results, it is about contributing to an ongoing conversation. That is one of the main reasons why I do not like to compare an Intranet wiki with Wikipedia, as it sets completely wrong standards for contributions.

Tags: blog, in sync, introduction, knowledge sharing, strategy, web2.0, wiki

Dit item is geplaatst door external author op 24 December 2008 om 11:17 in EN, team blog. Je kunt een reactie achterlaten, of een trackback op je eigen website opnemen.