An oxymoron, but it is happening. Business, large and small, are using technology like rich Internet applications, blogs, wikis, and social networks to foster productive, advantageous behaviour among employees, customers, and partners. Buzzwords like "social computing", "information workplace", and "collective intelligence" are now kosher. What changed?
Efforts to create channels that augment the intellectual power of work groups go back to the earliest days of computing. However, in the past decade-and-a-half or so, the global marketplace and prevalence of Web 2.0 tools have demanded a workforce empowered to generate ideas, solve problems and contribute to the common good without being micro-managed. Walls between management, customers and partners have to be torn down for things to work. Technologies that promote online collaboration and participation – for instance, blogs that seek customer feedback, and wikis that allow employees to work together on documents – are all the rage. In fact, a recent Fast Company report suggested how a global business could operate, using Cisco Systems as an example,
as a distributed idea engine where leadership emerges organically, unfettered by a central command."
Organizations like Cisco (and one doesn’t have to be as big or global as them), are re-interpreting ‘collaboration’ as "co-labour: working towards a common goal," and striving for a culture where it "unacceptable not to share what you know" (Mike Mitchell, director of technology communications at Cisco). The Fast Company report notes:
Cisco citizens are blogging, vlogging, and virtualizing, using social-networking tools that they’ve made themselves…
Indeed, C-Vision, a YouTube inside the Cisco firewall, has become one of the company’s most popular communication tools. Product reports, sales ideas, and engineering updates, are all created from the creators’ desks and published directly to the C-Vision channel.
No filter, no lawyers. It is a petri dish for ideas and exchange.
The "socialised" corporate also becomes a magnet for top talent, as Google is finding out. Such entities depend on collaborative projects and free flows of information that encourage employees to share ideas, and "democratise strategy and distribute leadership in order to stimulate innovation" (Gary Hamel). Career seekers today don’t just check out your web site, but also hang out in employee blogs, company-related message boards, and networking sites such as LinkedIn to gain a 360-degree view of their potential employers.
It’s also not a bad deal for the companies that can turn to the crowd to help curb the rising cost of corporate research.
Just as corporate entities use these tools to facilitate "gray markets in information and interpersonal exchange" (Wired), it is important also open up channels for customers to chime in. Businesses are increasingly letting real users have a tangible impact on decision making. Dell’s Ideastorm, Starbucks’ My Starbucks Idea, and 37Signals, creators of Basecamp, rely extensively on customer feedback for constant product improvements. Starwood Hotels uses Second Life to create a detailed 3D model of a new chain of hotels it’s creating (hat tip Boxes and Arrows). Users walk through this virtual hotel environment and give feedback on everything from architecture to the fabrics. Starwood thus gains valuable input for improving its product before actual construction begins (leading to significant cost savings) , and potential guests get to contribute in a very real manner, driving customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Let’s not forget the humble corporate web site too, which needs to be a cornerstone of marketing, sales, and servicing efforts.
For purveyors of such "Enterprise 2.0" technology, the market is not negligible (a $4.6 billion industry by 2013 and social networking tools will garner the bulk of the money, according to a report by Forrester Research).
However, we all know it’s content, and not the tools and technology that matters at the end of the day. How do we make these work for us really well? A discussion for another day.
