Reports such as this provide one with a window into this world from one perspective and provide a rich source of information. It was created from inputs from over 600 companies, the majority being US based and followed by Europe and the rest of the world. Of these, almost 2 thirds have SharePoint in one form or another and with this likely to increase, especially with the release of SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint 2010 is of interest of course, in that it provides enhanced social capabilities -the blogs, wiki and discussion capabilities are much better than in previous releases. But what the report shows is that the greatest use is in core data collaboration and document sharing functions and that Microsoft:

…successfully targeted a latent demand for browser-based collaboration with the original SharePoint concept, and this has subsequently resonated with the increase in globalized teamwork and increased mobility.

Of note Company portals and staff-facing intranets are high but not top of the list and are followed by the social aspects:

Enterprise 2.0 functions, such as forums, blogs and wikis. Users are obviously looking to SharePoint to provide their Enterprise 2.0 functionality, as the graph shows that there are very few alternative solutions in already in place [10%].

So, we have near on market dominance and with SharePoint set to become the defacto platform for many social endeavours in the enterprise, but. And it’s a big but. Reading the report more closely shows quite a potentally alarming picture.

For over a third of companies (36%) it is their first implementation of ECM and a quarter it is their CMS and 15% use it as their portal and intranet. And of these, nearly 25% have teams site proliferation. Less than a half had any business plan and of those that did, less than half of these but any hard cost figures on it.

When it came to governance, IT owned the governance in over 60% of companies, around 25% did it on a departmental or records management basis. Some 9% had soft governance at a local level and 5% admitted that there was not only no governance but that SharePoint was totally out of control. Where there was governance, this was in the majority of cases on who could set up a site, roles and access.

In no instance was there a clear governance of what we might call the enterprise 2.0 aspect and of driving, guiding and evangelising social software adoption. In no instance was there an indication of internal communications input and guidance. SharePoint is it would seem, a technology and not a collaborational practice that is embedded into the business and aligned to its strategy.

This to me at least rings alarm bells. Perhaps for others too – take for example these comments from the report’s appendix:

Refs
SharePoint – strategies and experiences (requires free registration)
SharePoint Surge Continues but Strategies are Lacking
Previous posts on SharePoint

For vendors, it will be a tough five years as companies pick a messaging and collaboration partner for the next decade.

The net result for end users will be an increasing unification of communications. The focus will be the  InBox, but with wiki posting, activities and Tweets, will it be e-mail as we know it?

The Enterprise : Content Management System (CMS, central, guidelines & Governance)

The Business : Collaborative Software (Team Based, IT provided)

The Individual : Social Network (Profile based, Evangelist driven)

Jane rightly argues that there are different entry points here and they require different governance. She did seem to point to the individual network driven aspect being in some way created by the individual, I could not see how that would work unless the network was of sufficient scale to create a network, which implies a more collaborative scope. Maybe on this we have the more central Enterprise capability and then the Collaborative sphere that includes the Business and the Individual.

Now when Deb comes to work on this knotty problem she also defines a triple organisational breakdown (with the caveat that they’re obliquely defined) and correlates to these, 3 forms of collaboration:

Team : Creative Collaboration> Process driven, Communication, Organisation, team based

Community : Connective Collaboration> Serendipity driven, looser ties, ‘expert locator’, network based

Organisation : Compounding Collaboration>  Leveraging the already done, Knowledge Management+

What I thought of note here (& not to miss also a fabulous definition of the Intranet), is that like Jane, Deb describes two aspects to these spaces/activities and argues that we have the social intranet sphere, which is enterprise based and the collaborational space which is more team-based. Deb argues that no one set of tools can meet the needs of both.

So if we take a deep breath here, we can see in both descriptions that we have (not withstanding our dire need of new terms):

Enterprise : CMS, KM: Enterprise Social Network platform.
Business/Teams/Communities : Social Networks, Collaboration Tools

or as Deb puts it:

“It’s no longer about social intranet vs. collaboration, but organizational enablement vs. team enablement.”

Now at this point, I take a dialectical step backwards and argue that there’s a productive engagement in this contest of needs, that they are mutually dependent, that it’s not a question of ‘Or’, but ‘And’. I would like to structure this as the more formally structured and slower changing Enterprise and along side it the less formally structured and more organic, faster changing, area of the Team and collaboration. One is organised as a Library might be, it is Taxonomic, the other more Creative, it is Folksonomic and structures itself in ways more akin to the Library.

I have tried to represent these ideas as so (they’re a little more 3D in my mind and a lot less static) :

There’s something missing here and which without it, the 2 digital spheres could, perhaps would remain completely disconnected. And that I would argue is the Network, with its prime modus being the Connectedness between People to People and the Intranet, with its prime modus being the Connectedness between People and Data. Thus we have something looking more like this:

On this I would argue that we need the social cohesiveness and connectivity to make that, and this being the Holy Grail of KM, to make that Data, Knowledge. But we also have other interesting things happening here, we have in organisations without a full social suite of capabilities, teams and people using collaborative technologies – digital phones both mobile and fixed; webinars and conferencing; and of course any other tool they might shadowly bring into work. These in themselves create drivers for connecting up the individual collaborations and making them more social. They also create expectations too.

But more importantly, we can see the business need, almost imperative to introduce some means of connecting up the parts. What’s needed is a way of connecting up the more formal Enterprise structure with the rest of the Business. A traditional 1.0 intranet won’t do that, it will be forever a static portal onto the silos of data in the management systems.

And then comes the rub. We have on the one had the collaboration tools, the Cisco WebEx and Microsoft Communicators for example, as well as the usual 2.0 tools at play. We have a more social intranet, possible overlapping and interloping into the collaboration space and vice versa. The questions then becomes thus:

Should the more structured Enterprise be integrated into the Collaboration space (and vice versa)?
If so, how can this be achieved without in doing so, creating a Social Business?

Refs
Is Social Intranet a Collaboration Solution?
To technology strategists: how to blend enterprise + business + people?
Scaling the Enterprise Social Network Pyramid

“As far as centralised command and control, what I really meant was the application of standards and foresight to implement scalable architectures. The Internet is based on standards and furthermore YouTube, Twitter, Slideshare have become de-facto application standards as the scale of Internet and the winner take all dynamic means that all others become redundant. I don’t think this is the case in Enterprises where competing solutions and approaches proliferate within different departments, geographies etc and tactical solutions persist rather than die. That is the meaning I was hoping to convey.”

You can read the full reply here, you’ll need to join the Group first though.

Read my original squib.

It is peppered with quotes from well known UK 2.0 people – Dave Terrar, Paul Millar, Scott Gavin and a few practitioners (those what do). It says all the right things. The study lists out some good case studies and best practice, even identifying 5 steps to successfull rollout

1. Determine what the business wants to achieve
2. Lead by example – identify evangelists to drive the utilisation of new tools
3. Choose projects to allow employees to trial use of the new tools
4. Enable search and mobile networking
5. Remove redundant tools

Of note, 2 of these I’ve seen questioned of late – choose the evangelists where the business process matters most, not by those most enthusiastic and ignore redundant tools (both by Dion Hinchcilffe I believe).

There’s a twist in the tail in this report though. Perhaps not surprisingly, Oracle being Oracle, they seem to see a solution in centralised knowledge management

“Oracle says that one of the reasons for this wasted time is the amount of applications people are using at work – the average employee uses over five different applications at work on a weekly basis. This lack of a centralised system for storing, accessing and managing documents means workers have to spend time copying and pasting the same information between documents stored in different places.”
Steve Evans

This is spelled out even more clearly in the report itself:

“Central to an organisation’s use of Enterprise 2.0 tools is the ability to keep knowledge within the organisation, no matter where employees go. By integrating all the communications from Enterprise 2.0 tools back into enterprise systems, everything is captured. This means that knowledge isn’t lost, but also that more meaningful conversations can be had with customers and suppliers.”

There’s something slightly discomforting and contradictory here – or shall I say I detect a worry from Oracle’s part. E 2.0 loosens up working practices and in and productive ways. For Oracle at the final stage, the aim is to control, to keep all conversations within the business, where everything is captured.

That to me sounds rather like the 1.0 model of knowledge management….Or am I just being churlish here? We need data, we need ubiquitous data and ubiquitous access. But do we need the central command and control model suggested here?

Update: Oracle Answers my questions – they are 2.0…

Refs

Oracle Research Reveals Workplace Technology is Hindering Business Productivity and Collaboration

UK businesses and workers split on Enterprise 2.0: study – Steve Evans

Whilst not going into any detail here, I was encouraged by the content as it confirmed some of my thoughts over a widget driven intranet, the role of the Cloud and the impact HTML5 will have on our future intranets. I could also see a new landscape of competition emerging in the future with social software vendors and more traditional Content Management System (CMS) vendors.

There was one thing I hadn’t thought about though, and that is OpenSocial. This is (or something similar) is essential for all that I’ve been thinking about to work. At heart is the factor of interoperabilty in new social intranets, something that Atlassian’s Jay Simons sees at one of the 5 determining factors of OpenSocial’s importance. What this means is that widgets or other discreet components can work together easily and seamlessly, so long that is that they all use the same system.

The big one that doesn’t of course is Facebook’s and I need to understand more the limits this might put on the interconnectedness of intranety technology. But then, who is using Facebook’s connectivity for enterprise social software?

If the same question is put of OpenSocial then the answer is legion – Jive, OpenText, Google (who made the thang of course and Cisco. And Cisco of course like interoperability - the router is the essence of interoperability and in the fight with Apple of who owned the right to use the work iPhone a key concession wrung from Apple by Cisco was on interoperability.

On doing my research on this, I was pleased to come across this slide deck by Kit Sharma. I’ve worked with Kit on intranet stuff so it brought a big smile on my face to see his work here.

Refs

Five reasons OpenSocial will change the Enterprise Jay Simons, Atlassian
Enterprise OpenSocial – A Year of Progress Adina Levin, OpenText

(I’ve seen this in real life)

There are five areas of tension in the argument:

1) Oliver argues that a level playing ground is needed to protect and keep vibrant the collaborative community. However, due to the stakes at play 2.0 can be the maelstrom and centre for political power play and control. This is rarely level.

2) The technology of 2.0 is in constant flux, and as example, smart mobile technologies will transform the space.

3) The Business is in flux too. Depending on the sector this will be at varying speeds, but nonetheless the Business will change and 2.0 will accelerate this change. 2.0 operations need if not quite at the centre of this activity, needs at least a clear line of sight to the business strategy to maintain relevance and cohesion.

4) Although the core collaboration is inside the firewall, the firewall is regularly crossed in terms of cross-enterprise and team collaborations – e-mail, web 2.0, chattering clients, TV, the meeting.

5) People will change, not only in terms of churn, but also the roles and expertise will change as all the factors listed above come into play.

In what Oliver calls the brutal world of running a 2.0 DMZ it’s essential to ensure that:

Longer term strategic needs for a scalable, coherent collaborative backbone which connects silos and units on top of existing BI and associated infrastructure is tough in a world of quarterly results targets, and where staffing may completely change over time.

So how do we achieve this? In some way the argument calls for something above and beyond yet within and part of the business fabric. The nearest concept I can think of is some sort of Habermas type Public Sphere.

For Habermas the Public Sphere is an essential part of democratic society (he draws heavily on Hannah Arendt’s working on the Ancient Greek Polis) and is a space that exists for politics and discussion and is not subsumed in business or personal life. But here of course we are talking about Business and nothing but Business.

Maybe there’s something here to be learned from Corporate Social Responsibility. This is maybe a Cultural issue for the business, which can no more transcend the drive for profit than it can the market which defines it, (there being no such thing as a free luncheon after all….)

The question then comes down to this, how to be both part of and above the storm? Oliver almost calls for priests or at best non-partisan civil servants to manage the collaboration.:

Weaving collaborative workflow intents into the way you want staff to work over time is essential to realize the relevancy and power of collaborative 2.0 technologies without exposing the people tasked to run it to the realities of business political border disputes and fault lines.

The problem here though, is this role doesn’t seem to match those evangelizing in the enterprise today…For the tales I hear, the ones I have seen, means working and evangelizing on precisely those fault lines and around those disputes. Of that there seems little escape.

Ref
“Demilitarizing Collaboration: Designing Rules of Engagement” ZDNET
“The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere“ Wikipedia, so take it with a large pinch of salt.

The article looks at systems of control that prevent transgression (speed cameras and the like) and asks if they make us better people or not. The rum idea is that by choosing not to do wrong, we might be better than simply not being able to do wrong (at least not able without the certainty of a a resounding thwak on the metaphysical or corporeal buttocks).

This made me think of all those discussions of social media governance at work and whether one should or should not be able to chat with friends and enemies on FaceBook, Twitter or LinkedIn while at work. It also ties in with the ability for an intranet to effectively monitor our every keystroke. Systems like Autonomy for example, have the potential to monitor all an employee types while logged in (at least so my boss tells me) and send off an e-mail to HR, the minute you type ‘CV’…

The article does raise, and I think answer the question of what sort of people we want at work – ones monitored all day long, clocking in and clocking out all their actions and chained to the cyber keyboard or their corporate duties. Or, do we want ones who exercise choice and responsibilities; ones who are judged and rewarded on what they deliver, rather than how many rules they obey?

Social Media Guidelines at Work Policy
In light of this, I think the best Social Media Guidelines at Work policy could be whittled down to a commandment of almost Biblical simplicity:

“Thou shalt not take the piss.”

And what I mean by this is simple. Do not restrict access. Trust the employees. But those employees in being given this trust, should not abuse it. I think this is fair and honest.

Links

Should God have placed CCTV cameras in the Garden of Eden?
Does Surveillance Make Us Morally Better?
Autonomy.com