The Culture of Collaboration

Recasting Knowledge Management

Collaboration is shaking up the once-staid field of Knowledge Management (KM) as enterprise social media and interaction play an increasing role. The premise of KM is that an organization’s intellectual capital or “intangible” assets comprise its greatest value and that therefore the organization must manage these assets.  Through the 1990’s, KM gained traction with the growth of data networks, the evolution of database technology and the increasing premium placed on information.

KM has traditionally supported command-and-control organizational cultures and structures in which the organization seeks to gather, retain, unlock and control its resources. And often believing that data drives knowledge, organizations have pushed to populate data repositories. Enterprise blogs and wikis have added an unstructured element to creating and capturing knowledge. As social media takes hold in organizations, KM practitioners are rethinking their craft, integrating social media and collaborative tools into their frameworks, and recasting KM as embodying collaboration. The goal is to broaden KM’s appeal and, in particular, engage younger team members.

“I define knowledge management as information management and collaboration,” insists Katrina B.  Pugh, author of Sharing Hidden Know-How (Jossey-Bass, 2011). Kate, a KM consultant and former vice president of knowledge management at Fidelity Investments, believes gathering data should take a back seat to sharing information. “It’s much more about improving those interactions than populating those repositories,” she explained during a compelling conversation recently.

People often use the terms social media and collaboration interchangeably. Social media describes a category of tools that can be used to collaborate. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I define collaboration as “working together to create value while sharing virtual or physical space.” It’s quite possible to create no value while using social media. It’s also possible to create substantial value. And considering the current excitement over these tools, I asked Kate whether there’s a downside to social media when it comes to KM. “It’s losing the person-to-person interaction,” she quickly responded. By person-to-person, Kate means voice, video and face-to-face encounters. I suggested these real-time encounters have a more “three-dimensional” quality. Kate agreed. “The best social media interactions are the ones that follow a conversation,” she noted.

Conversation, in fact, is at the heart of Kate’s approach to KM outlined in her book. She calls the approach "Knowledge Jam." The idea is to transfer knowledge from “knowledge originators” to “knowledge brokers” through facilitation, conversation and translation. A facilitator, either an outside consultant or internal team member, jump starts the Knowledge Jam during a series of structured 90-minute sessions.

I raised two issues with Kate:

1. Many knowledge originators are “go-to” people who hoard information
2. Is a facilitator necessary?

Absolutely, Kate agrees, knowledge originators may hoard. That’s why “there must be something in it for them [to share knowledge],” Kate explains. And that something is that “in a shifting environment, they need to learn the new playing field.” In other words, to remain relevant and keep their jobs, Kate believes knowledge originators will trade their knowledge for new context and skills. What about the need for a facilitator? Yes, Kate says, getting the conversation going between knowledge originators and knowledge brokers requires a facilitator.

I get that a facilitator can jump start Knowledge Jam, but ultimately organizations must share knowledge and collaborate naturally. The problem with consultants as facilitators (full disclosure: I’m a consultant) is that when they step aside, the organization can easily revert to previous behaviors. The problem with internal facilitators is their perceived and, at times, actual lack of neutrality. For collaborative organizations, sharing must become part of DNA. And KM is part of that equation.

As KM evolves to fit with more collaborative organizational cultures and structures, the term knowledge management also needs updating. Management suggests hierarchy and command-and-control. How about knowledge collaboration (KC)?

Enhancing Products with Collaborative Services

Last Wednesday, I stopped into Rosetta Stone’s splashy event in a trendy nightclub in San Francisco’s SOMA district. Company officials were on hand to demonstrate Rosetta Stone Version 4 TOTALe. Chris Spiller, executive producer, demonstrated the Spanish version of the popular software for learning languages.

Chris and I discussed how immersing oneself in another culture is by far the best way to learn a language. And we shared stories about the overemphasis on grammar in high school foreign language classes.  It turns out that cultural immersion is exactly what Rosetta Stone had in mind when developing Version 4 TOTALe. “We looked at what are the pieces of that experience we can recreate through technology,” Chris explained.

Rosetta Stone has recently transformed its offering into a hybrid product/collaborative service. This means that no longer must customers learn a language in a vacuum. They can now collaborate with other learners globally and can also learn from language coaches who interact with customers through one-way video and two-way audio. Adobe provides and hosts Rosetta Stone’s video and audio through its Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service Platform. Incidentally, today Adobe is releasing version 8 of a related web conferencing product called Adobe Connect.

Rosetta Stone Version 4 TOTALe includes Rosetta Studio, which involves live, interactive coaching. The bundle also features Rosetta World, which lets users collaborate with fellow learners. There are lots of activities and games that geographically-dispersed users can do together while talking with each other in the language they’re learning via voice over IP (VOIP) and text chat. Other activities pair learners with native speakers who are, in turn, learning their partner’s language. This collaboration among customers accelerates learning and creates value.

Getting customers to collaborate with each other can turn a maturing product into a virally-adopted habit. Smart companies realize that collaboration is more than customers participating in discussion forums. It’s about getting customers to create value using a product or service together in real time. Depending on the product, collaborating among customers may involve creating, learning or playing.

Besides enhancing learning, the collaborative service lets Rosetta Stone enhance its business model and presumably its revenue. The software includes three months of access to Rosetta Studio and Rosetta World, and customers can then buy more access. I suspect that this hybrid software-as-a-product/collaborative service model is a prelude to a pure software-as-a-service (SAAS) offering.

While Rosetta Stone officials say the company has no plans to expand offerings beyond language software and services, this collaborative approach to online learning could apply to subjects ranging from history and geography to algebra and physics. A user in India and a user in Germany could collaborate to learn the geography, history and culture of their respective countries.

The big picture is that companies in many industries can create value by encouraging customers to collaborate with each other. This produces greater stickiness by building interactive communities around products with the potential of generating new revenue streams.  And this goes well beyond software. Take a product like a motorcycle. With a 3D model of the motorcycle plus interactive audio and video, enthusiasts can collaborate on maintenance, diagnosing problems, and doing repairs. Collaborating among customers could also apply to furniture. Using a 3D model of a home or office and choices of virtual furniture, customers could exchange ideas and collaboratively design spaces for living and working.

Collaboration among customers can build brands, increase marketplace stickiness, and create new revenue streams.   

 

Mayo Clinic Enhancing Collaboration

The Mayo Clinic, founded on the principle of collaboration, is taking collaboration and innovation to the next level. With a mission nothing short of transforming how healthcare is experienced and delivered, Mayo’s Center for Innovation integrates emerging collaborative tools into processes and culture. The Center for Innovation includes Mayo’s innovative S.P.A.R.C. design lab.

 

While writing The Culture of Collaboration book, I conducted on-site research at S.P.A.R.C. and throughout Mayo. Now it’s time for an update. The catalyst was a recent conversation with Chris Yeh of PBworks, which offers a hosted wiki-oriented business collaboration platform with newly-added integrated voice conferencing. Mayo is piloting PBworks along with other online collaborative spaces. “We call it a sandbox where people can figure things out,” Francesca Dickson of Mayo’s Center for Innovation told me yesterday during a Skype video call.

 

Francesca and Beth Kreofsky of Mayo’s Center for Innovation provided an inside view of how Mayo is evolving, and we talked about the role of tools. Aside from PBworks, Mayo is also piloting “ideation” tools that let team members share ideas and build on them based on “focused questions.” One such tool is Jive.

 

Besides asynchronous social tools, Mayo is now piloting instant messaging in several departments including nursing and radiology. Paging, a precursor to instant messaging, is deeply engrained in Mayo’s culture. Anybody can page the CEO and expect a prompt call back. Hierarchy is muted at Mayo, and the CEO is always a practicing physician. Mayo’s culture is ripe for IM and unified communications through which people can connect spontaneously through IM, voice or video regardless of level, role or region.

 

Meantime, paging persists at Mayo. The Center for Innovation’s mission is to keep Mayo, well, innovating. So the Center is demonstrating to the organization that IM offers a clear advantage over paging.

 

Video is another tool that’s part-and-parcel of Mayo’s culture. Mayo was an early user of videoconferencing to encourage collaboration among its three campuses. Mayo has already piloted Cisco TelePresence with a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. And beginning in April, patients in Canon Falls, Minnesota will receive consultations from Mayo specialists via TelePresence.

 

By integrating new collaborative tools into its already collaborative culture, Mayo will likely enhance healthcare delivery and create greater value.

Reflection Enhances Collaboration

Recently, I’ve grown concerned about the lack of reflection that can compromise collaboration. I define reflection as “pausing to think.” Reflection is increasingly lost in our interrupt and interact-driven culture. It may seem counter-intuitive in that reflection suggests working alone or in a vacuum. But there’s a difference.

 

Some people think they do their best work by going off in a corner and making their mistakes in private. They prefer to interact with others only after they feel they got their part right on their own. Once their part is complete, they prefer to toss their work over the fence to the next person to do their part. This assembly-line approach to decision making, problem solving and product and service development compromises value.  This behavior clearly undermines collaboration.

 

The other extreme is that in this Twitter-twitching, Facebook feeding, blog-obsessed culture, we feel compelled to constantly interact. Some health experts insist the fallout from these potentially obsessive behaviors includes everything from repetitive strain injuries to heart attacks, not to mention neglect of loved ones or divorce. Like endless face-to-face meetings, much of this online interaction is falsely labeled collaboration.

 

In The Culture of Collaboration book, I define collaboration as “working together to create value while sharing virtual or physical space.” Also, value is one of the Ten Cultural Elements of Collaboration that I identify in the book. Creating value is critical to collaboration. In fact, it’s a useful acid test.

 

Social networking includes a portfolio of tools and behaviors that can lead to collaboration, but it takes  more than a tweet, post, text or instant message to collaborate. Social networking and social media output can be much like cable television chatter. The difference is that social networking lets us participate, and we tend to dip in and out all day long. It’s easy to devote big chunks of time to chatter. And there’s nothing wrong with chatter, but it’s not necessarily collaboration.

 

Constant interaction without reflection can compromise collaboration and value creation. Brainstorming, sharing ideas, and co-creation produces incredible value. When we pause to think, however, we can contribute more effectively when we’re collaborating. Reflection enhances value creation for collaborators.

 

Using collaborative tools for chatter and fun helps instill behavior that sparks collaboration, but it’s easy to just keep chattering and never get around to creating value. Use value creation as an acid test for collaboration, and we derive greater satisfaction and real results from social networking and other collaborative tools. And reflection is part of that equation.

@GoCollaboration Aggregates Collaboration Blogs on Twitter

Micro-blogging is transforming how people connect and disseminate information. The most prevalent micro-blogging service is Twitter, but there are many other services that are focusing on micro-blogging within enterprises. Typically, a micro-blog is a sentence or two plus sometimes a link to a blog or other content.

 

Sensing that micro-blogging has the potential to create value internally and externally, many companies are adopting the medium. Internally, micro-blogging can provide project, function, and subject updates throughout the day plus encourage DM, which is Twitter talk for “direct message” or private message exchange. Micro-blogging is another tool that may potentially enhance collaboration among colleagues. Externally, micro-blogging can enhance brands and create viral adoption of products and services.

 

Micro-blogging can also be used to aggregate content from multiple blogs and sources. Considering that other bloggers have compelling thoughts and ideas about collaboration and realizing the potential for one-stop-shopping for collaboration blogs, Joe Solomon and I created @GoCollaboration on Twitter. I’ve worked with Joe on numerous projects, and he’s a collaborator extraordinaire.

 

@GoCollaboration includes more than thirty collaboration blogs including The Culture of CollaborationÒ.  We’re aggregating everything from the Wikinomics blog and the Learning to Collaborate blog to the Cisco collaboration blog and the Intuit QuickBase blog. @GoCollaboration also includes blogs that are focused on key components of collaboration like Keith Sawyer’s informative Creativity and Innovation blog and the Enterprise 2.0 blog. Besides aggregating this and other blogs, I’m also including my own tweets and conversation on @GoCollaboration.

 

If you have suggestions for non-technical collaboration blogs we should include on @GoCollaboration, let me know.

Collaborative Music and Video Production Changing Entertainment Business

Budding musicians, filmmakers and other artists are creating value through collaborative production. Online creative collaboration now goes well beyond finding and meeting like-minded artists. Now people are producing artistic works collaboratively without sharing physical space. This is having an increasing impact on creativity, the product and the business of art.

Not long ago, gatekeepers controlled the relationship between artists and audiences. NPR’s “All Things Considered” broadcast a compelling story last Saturday about Robert Goldstein, an NPR staff librarian. You can listen to the story here. In the late 1970’s, Goldstein was a guitarist for the Urban Verbs, a Washington, D.C. band. The Urban Verbs almost made it…

 Band members had a connection with the Talking Heads and producer, Brian Eno. Eno was reportedly “blown away” by the Urban Verbs and offered to produce some tracks. Record labels were initially enthusiastic, and Warner Brothers signed the band. However, Warner Brothers reportedly dumped the Urban Verbs after Rolling Stone “slaughtered” the band with a bad review.

While gatekeepers including big media, distributors, producers and others still have an impact, the balance is clearly shifting in favor of unknown artists. Aside from social media sites like Facebook and MySpace, which connect artists with fans and other artists, collaborative production sites take creative collaboration to the next level. These include TheNetStudio for music and Rootclip for film and video. The difference between these and social networking sites is analogous to the difference between using enterprise collaboration tools to design and produce products and services and using such tools for meetings. Collaborative production clearly creates greater value than just connecting.

TheNetStudio is a virtual recording studio through which artists can submit songs for collaboration. Somebody on an island in the South Pacific who has composed a great song can collaboratively create a finished product with musicians in Paris, New York or Los Angeles without ever sharing the same physical space. TheNetStudio, which uses a subscription model, currently enables asynchronous collaboration but will ultimately provide real-time music production as technology evolves to support ultra high quality synchronous sound over the Internet. Currently, sites including Ninjam, eJamming and Musigy offer real-time, online musical collaboration.

In the film and video realm, Rootclip provides an initial “root” clip, one-to-two minutes of video that begins a story. Collaborators determine the path the visual story takes by submitting one-minute videos to move the story from one chapter to the next. The Rootclip community votes on which videos should be used for the next chapter. The creator of each winning video chapter receives $500 and acknowledgment in the credits. The winner of the final chapter round gets a trip to the Traverse City Film Festival in Michigan and a meeting with filmmaker, Michael Moore. Rootclip’s business model is advertising, and ironically big media (the E.W. Scripps Company) is supporting the startup through its venture capital arm.

The big-picture impact of collaborative production is how the medium is changing the product. This phenomenon goes well beyond reproducing or approximating musical or video collaboration in which collaborators share the same physical space. As efforts like TheNetStudio and Rootclip proliferate, artistic endeavors will reflect the input of people from multiple cultures and regions. Finished works will increasingly reflect a broader and perhaps different perspective.

Oh…as for the Urban Verbs, the band recently reunited for a show at the 9:30 Club in D.C.

Real-Time Collaboration Transforming Social Networking

Many organizations think they’re collaborating by making internal social networking available. However, many minimally-collaborative people have personal sites. Enabling social networking with real-time functionality creates new possibilities for organizational collaboration.

I gave a speech several months ago to U.S. government officials who are focused on getting agencies to collaborate. The agencies were using wikis and a sort of internal MySpace, and the culture was in the early stages of becoming collaborative. A central theme of my talk was how real-time collaboration is changing business models and how we work.

Presence, I explained to the government audience, would soon transform social networking by letting us know who’s online and available for spontaneous interaction. For more on presence, see my March 7, 2007 post. With a single click from somebody’s MySpace page or the internal equivalent, a colleague could launch an instant messaging session. The collaborators could then escalate the chat into a web conference or videoconference.

So…I was delighted to read a story in today’s New York Times headlined “Online Chat, As Inspired By Real Chat” in which Brad Stone nails the shortcomings of typical social networking. “It’s like an endless party where everybody shows up at a different time and slaps a yellow Post-it note on the refrigerator,” Stone writes. The story describes how several Silicon Valley companies are bringing “live socializing” to social networking. One company, Vivaty, lets users add 3-D virtual chat rooms to Web pages and social networking sites. Vivaty Scenes offers an immersive experience in which users choose avatars to represent them.  Another company featured in the Times story is Meebo, which lets users add instant messaging to blogs, Web sites and social networking pages.

Real-time and asynchronous collaboration are no longer divorced modeds. This means that real-time collaboration will occur more easily, more often and more spontaneously. This impacts our collective culture in that we'll be interacting more in real time through social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Within the enterprise, we can read somebody's personal page or a team site and from there connect with people on the fly to resolve issues or make a decision. Nevertheless, improved tools are merely enablers. It takes a collaborative culture to create value through collaboration.

Reputation and Collaboration

I was having dinner with some venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley recently, and social commerce was on everybody’s mind. We discussed different business models and the prospects of some startups. Eventually, the conversation turned to blogging and, specifically, to why people blog.

At the top of the list is reputation. Pundits blog to build their visibility and ownership of a topic. CEO’s blog to build their reputations with team members, investors and customers. People at all levels of organizations blog to establish their expertise. Marketers use blogs to enhance the reputation of brands.

Within enterprises, blogging is becoming a knowledge and content management solution. Ideas can be captured, retained and repurposed. At its best, blogging is a collaborative rather than a solo pursuit. Collaborators can blog about each other’s posts or leave comments on the original posts. And team reputation can be a motivator for collaborative blogging.

Just as reputation is important for bloggers, reputation also plays a role more broadly in collaborative culture. Trust is one of the 10 Cultural Elements of Collaboration that I identify in The Culture of Collaboration book, and reputation plays a big role in trust. Reputation is based on work style, knowledge, team contributions, and integrity, among other factors. It’s becoming easier to connect and collaborate with people based on their reputations. As we establish our expertise and interests through blogging, vlogs, team sites, mashups, wikis, social networking sites and other modes, we can more easily collaborate and create value.

Reputation also plays a role in real-time, spontaneous collaboration. Using presence (see my March 7, 2007 post), we can connect in real-time via IM, audio or video with people reputed to have relevant skills, knowledge and expertise. Every organization has internal experts on everything from purchasing to intellectual property. Increasingly, their reputations are based on contributions through wikis, team sites, blogs and meetings (which can be captured, retained, indexed and searched based on keyword). Presence lets us see their availability status and connect with these experts on the fly to solve mission-critical issues and make faster, better decisions.

Yale Law School's Information Society Project is tackling reputation issues in its upcoming “Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace.” The conference, scheduled for December 8, 2007 in New Haven, will explore the shift towards the “wisdom of the crowd” and away from such traditional forms of reputation as educational background, institutional affiliations, and traditional business networks. Undoubtedly, this shift has wide-ranging implications for society. But the change in how we view reputation also impacts gatekeepers of every kind: publishers, studios, traditional media and elite universities and institutions. If reputation is based more on what we write, say and do online and less on affiliations, gatekeepers will play less of a role.

Strayform Lets Artists Collaborate with Patrons

Brandt Cannici has circumnavigated the globe, speaks Japanese fluently plus has a background in programming and finance. A mutual friend put us together recently, because of Brandt’s interest in collaboration. His most recent endeavor is Strayform, a social networking startup that connects artists with people wanting to sponsor artistic projects—music, movies, books, software, and research. You can check out Strayform here.

The idea behind Strayform is to cut out gatekeepers who are often a barrier to getting artistic projects off the ground. So rather than waiting for a publisher, record label or studio to say yes, artists can get micro grants from those who believe in them. Strayform also includes a licensing engine so that artists can grant creative commons licenses for non-commercial purposes as well as commercial licenses.

One project currently listed on Strayform is an oil painting to commemorate Silicon Valley leaders. Based on the concept of commissioned portraits, this business model involves micro patronage. For $200, you can be included in the artist’s rendering of Silicon Valley leaders. Not a bad price, considering the painting might one day hang in a museum…or at least on somebody’s wall. You can view the project proposal here.

Spiders Getting Collaboration Religion?

Are spiders becoming more collaborative? Experts are debating how and why spiders have spun a giant “web site” in Lake Tawakoni State Park in Texas.

The spiders created a “white fairyland” encompassing many trees. What perplexes experts is that spiders are not particularly collaborative creatures. Unlike other insects including bees and ants, spiders normally work alone in gathering food and building their homes.

So what gives? One theory is that a rare social species of spider cooperated to build a large colony. Social spiders sometimes form colonies in tropical areas in the southern hemisphere, according to an expert quoted in The Dallas News. You can read the story here. Hmmm….social networking among spiders. What’s next? Spiderpedia or SlinkedIn?

Another theory is that multiple species of spiders may have acted in concert.

Perhaps spiders are beginning to understand the potential for collaboration. J

One thing is clear. The web is a huge accomplishment that one spider could never have achieved working alone.

And, yes, the giant Texas spider web is a reminder that we can create more value collaborating than competing.