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Lots of interesting upcoming events

external author — Tue, 26 May 2009 09:42:39 +0000

The coming weeks our agenda is full of interesting events. I’m sharing my list, although I won’t be able to make it to all of them:

June 17: The Professional Playground of the Future (our project day)
June 22: Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers (Lilia Efimova’s PhD defence)
June 22-24: ICE conference with a workshop by Marcel Bijlsma
June 24: Web2.0 in the Enterprise (NAF Insight congres with me speaking on stimulating cohesion with social media)
June 25-26: Reboot (a yearly gathering of creative minds on digital change and culture). Sad to have to skip this one…

Am I missing something here? (Not that the list above is manageable…) Post a comment!

Enterprise Collaboration Maturity Model

external author — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 09:17:49 +0000

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:

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.
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.

McKinsey survey on web2.0 adoptation revisited

Marcel Bijlsma — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:34:40 +0000

Interesting to read the McKinsey article on web2.0 (see our newspost: McKinsey: gemengde gevoelens over Web 2.0-tools). The original full version can be found here here). Again it seems the survey confirms a classical example on how tool adoption takes time and both users and management have to adjust to the new possibilities. Interesting in that respect is to see that the Web2.0 applications are significantly used for internal use within the company boundaries and begin to provide value there. In our rabobank Wiki case we found the same. In that respect we are in line with the 33 percent of all the satisfied respondents in the McKinsey survey, who report that Web 2.0 tools have changed interactions and have created new roles or functions inside the organization. A third of the satisfied respondents even feel that Web tools are changing its structure. We haven’t seen that yet, maybe again proving that it takes time to change and reap the full benefits.

FWS Workshop on Enterprise Social Software- 17 sept 2008

Marcel Bijlsma — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:40:40 +0000

17 September 2008

Future Workspaces organizes, together with IBM, a workshop on Enterprise Social Software. The workshop will be held on Wednesday September 17, from 9:30 to 12:30 hours at IBM The Netherlands, Amsterdam. The workshop is not an introduction into blogs, wikis, social bookmarking and social networking: instead it is aimed at sharing knowledge and experiences with the introduction and usage of such social tools within enterprises. A large part of the workshop will be devoted to sharing experiences and learning from each other. We hope you can join and share your insights and experiences.

Please visit the workshop wiki at http://workspace.telin.nl for the full programme, the list of participants and a list of topics the participants would like to discuss.