Seth Earley got a valid point last week in his video on “collaboration vs information reuse”.

Enterprise 2.0 hype is rapidly gaining a strong momentum in the industry. But most of the time there is no real clear distinction between the two pillars that are:

- Social Collaboration

- Knowledge Networks

But let’s start from the beginning:

Most social software players (at the exception of certain of course) tend to address E2.0 as a serie of checkbox-driven features empowered with some “web 2.0 / real-time web” technologies and prepackaged into ready to use “workspaces” (e.g: http://www.cubetree.com/site/compare_us ). Such solution should act as your new intranet 2.0. The whole is of course spiced up with a little bit of change management and change enablement speech.

Even if this is obviously not the core purpose of any analysts’ reports and even if they obviously need ways to properly regroup and classify underlying technologies, checkbox-driven listings could be perceived by some users as a confirmation of such an approach. Let’s take for example the table of content of the NN/g Enterprise 2.0 report (section 8: Technology and Tools): it will list series of features such as: Blogs, RSS, Wiki, Profile Management, Tagging, Social bookmarking, Microblogging,… The latest AIIM E.20 Industry watch report is also cataloging the different tools deployed in your company in order to assess your E2.0 readiness (even if I perfectly know that AIIM folks would never write these stats in order to promote such a simplistic vision of the E2.0 world). Does it finally mean that if a company ha not deployed a wiki, a blog, a microblogging or a social bookmarking feature on its new Intranet 2.0 yet, it will not become E2.0 “certified” or “compliant”?

Software vendors have of course all interests to heavily promote such a feature-rally as it will allow to them to sell more bundles of their various products’ line. And as customers are usually comparing products as part of their RFP on a side by side basis rather than really thinking about the usage they could do of such or such a feature in the context of their business environment, this is then not a surprise that suddenly everybody is popping up with flat list of collaboration features which could be rapidly assembled on top or as a substitute of an existing intranet.

Does such a feature inflation will result in better E2.0 business results? Is this a reason to radically switch to the extreme opposite and to fully remove your old intranet in order to replace it by a new Social Software Suite? Probably not.

This comes back to a key neglected point about E2.0: there is a clear need to better distinct which tools are needed to improve Social Collaboration and which ones to foster the development of Knowledge Networks.

Unleashing the power of the knowledge workers, harnessing internal collective intelligence, encouraging free discussions, strengthening the use of internal or external social networks, building awareness and similar business objectives should be of course strongly encouraged and promoted. They could undoubtedly result in improved idea generation, increased employees satisfaction and recognition and will finally lead to significant productivity gains.

But such a widespread use of tools and data could also result in massive Information Overload issues, lack of trusted source for reliable information, scattering of bad practices, rapid growth of trivialities the whole rapidly leading to massive productivity loss or major security and confidentiality problems.

Lately the E2.0 debate was mainly focused on the use of Collaboration / Social Media in the enterprise rather than on proper Information Reuse and Delivery. KM best practices looks like suddenly old-fashioned and obsolete while Web 3.0 technologies and other semantic initiatives are still perceived as being immature. The focus of the day should then be put on letting any employee create new virtual workspaces at will, access to any content he wants or instantly discuss on any ongoing topics rather than on ensuring proper information reuse, filtering and delivery.

Such a belief is emphasized by the recurrent idea that useful information will automatically and magically emerge on top of the noise in any public or private social networks. So let the noise be, incentive anyone to create more and from this information chaos, the right information will automatically be delivered to the right person at the right time through the right delivery channel. This is of course more than a wrong assumption. The web is overcrowded of journalists, analysts, bloggers and reviewers which are playing a role of catalyst and moderator. This is clearly not the case within the boundaries of a company where employees are already struggling to death to find some free time and certainly do not want to be spam with more information. As James Governor, an Industry Analyst at RedMonk was saying: “When I look around I see a world where the real value is in connecting people and knowledge. [..] We represent the network. We’re switchboard operators for the digital knowledge economy. That’s what social networkers are and do. We’re connectors.” So let’s suddenly do not underestimate the role and importance of such “internal enterprise connectors” and the tools they need to have in place to successfully operate in your E2.0 rollout strategy.

Franck Jordan also mentioned: “Knowledge work isn't predictable, but starting from scratch every time devalues the very point of knowledge: to learn and adapt our processes in order to perform faster, produce better products, and improve our livelihood. Otherwise, we would all be caught in the stone age, re-inventing the wheel. Structure, however minimal, is an essential seed for progress. A hybrid approach leverages what we learned, while offering the creative room to solve new problems and develop new and better ways of structuring our collaborative work.”

I must admit that I really like such an hybrid approach. Mixing the ease of use and convenience of collaborative workspaces and the proper usage of trusted and validated information channels within adequate knowledge networks makes a lot of sense to me.

To rapidly summarize the two pillars of a successful E2.0 strategy would then be:

Social Collaboration

Goal: Boost team working

Keywords: draft, ongoing work, collection of prerequisites and other kind of working materials, notes of meetings and other brainstorming sessions, spontaneous idea generation, personal or group oriented web filing cabinets,…

Tools: Dedicated Workspaces, Document annotations and versioning, Recording of Visioconference or group chats, Digital whiteboards, Google Wavelets, ePost-its, etc…

Deliverable: Validated content/information

Knowledge Networks

Goal: Harness company collective intelligence

Keywords: validated information, moderation and filtering, trusted sources, federated search, unified taxonomies, content, multi-channels content aggregation and repurposing, personalization and recommendations,…

Means:, Corporate Knowledge bases, Internal Newsletters and eZine, Official blogs Internal RSS/Microblogging Readers,…

Deliverable: widespread reuse and delivery of collective intelligence.

One of the key challenges is then to put in place a virtuous circle between these two pillars consisting in the successful implementation of a value chain similar to:

Collect -> Create -> Review/Approve -> Dispatch > Enrich -> Collect….

Let’s take two short concrete examples:

A subject matter expert needs to create a new blog post on the intranet

In order to write a new blog post, the subject matter expert usually first starts to collect series of disparate information which will serve to him as raw working materials. He will then draft several versions of his document until he is getting satisfaction with the resulting deliverable. All these elements are usually not shared and are saved on the user personal hard drive. He then publishes it on the company intranet (with or without prior review from the hierarchy according to the current company information policies). Last but not least he will try to actively promote the reading of his new blog post (usually through email or ideally through the usage of an enterprise microblogging system). Finally he will perhaps get some comments which will enrich his post. And some interesting ones will give him some new ideas to create a second post and so on.

In such a use case we could clearly distinct the collection and creation phase from the information delivery one.

Let’s now apply a similar scenario to a group of experts and not only to an individual.

An expert group needs to formalize and deliver a new internal best practice

Let’s now “socialize” the aforementioned process. The team leader will usually look for ways to rapidly create a new shared workspace and rapidly communicate it to the rest of the team. Such a work environment will often look like as a kind of shared web filing cabinet combined with some productivity tools. This workspace is usually secured and only limited to a restricted set of employees (you do not want to invite everybody to all your meetings). On the other hand, this expert group will also need to leverage and reuse existing information channels in order to keep other stakeholders informed on the project milestones or deliverables without becoming a source of additional spam for them. So from time to time they will reuse and repurpose information coming from their working environment to other official information channels.

It certainly looks like very basic use case scenario to most of you. But this also looks like so far away of some certain E2.0 practices I am now hearing or reading where any employee can access to or modify anything he wants.

Such uses cases rely in fact on two core principles:

The dynamic assembly of multi-usage content composites

As we could imagine from the previous example a “workspace” is most of the time the result of the assembly of certain components (or “composites”). Not all “projects” will require precisely and exactly the same sets of components in order to be successful. A project manager needs then to be able to rapidly assemble on the fly the unique set of tools he needs.

But what is more important to understand is that technically speaking the same Web 2.0 composites could be successfully reused in several environments. For example the same blog component could be used in the context of a workspace, as part of an official departmental or directional blog open to all employees or be directly integrated on the company public web site. Same component, same features but different usage and audience. So the flexibility to successfully assemble and reuse several “content composites” through different contexts will become a major advantage.

The question is then not to have such or such feature in your checkbox list but to be able to exploit it throughout all your possible use cases. So long live to SOA components or generic content composites rather than on monolithic social suites!

The importance of adequate Identity/Security Management

The second key point is about the importance of Identity and Security Management. As mentioned by Seth Earley on his video not all the document drafts and other working materials should suddenly be made available to everyone on the fallacious pretext of trying to increase transparency and communication within the company. Clear policies should be put in place in order to determine precisely who could access to what.

From an extended manner every company is now getting more virtual. As Mike Moran mentioned it: “The right way to think about this is that there is no “inside” or “outside” the enterprise. Some contractors preparing press releases might need to see the earnings information that most employees don’t. A company’s vendors -- and a customer in the beta program -- must be routinely briefed under nondisclosure terms on unannounced products, but most employees don’t need to know such secrets. A single Website could be open for the general public, with trusted customers, vendors, employees, and others having special clearance to see more. Some of this information would be shown to anyone, and other information would require that you log in to be authenticated to the data access system, the same way employees do on intranets today.”

This will emphasize the needs to properly address security issues at a granular content item level and foster the use of content interoperability standards.

On the importance of better content interoperability and on the key role of WCM&Portal

E2.0 is then really about the right merge and use of Collaboration and KM/CM tools combined.

Successful integration between new collaboration workspaces and trusted information channels will become critical. From this we can argue that the rapid adoption of emerging Content Interoperability standards will act as a key technical enabler in order to successfully enforce and promote content reuse whatever the underlying applications or repositories being in use inside your company.

This is then quite surprising to see at the same time that such standardization efforts occur the fast emergence of new information silos just because of the social hype of the day (for example, according to AIIM statistics, 90% of social content is not governed by any retention policy for the moment). Most of the social software vendors are not currently trying to better embrace and support such standards. It would be really great to see leading social players such Jive, Telligent or Mzinga to become more active supporters of specifications such as CMIS or the JSR170. However there are strong potentials of reconciling Social Software with Content Management platforms and WCM/Portal applications. After all isn’t the goal of a WCM/Portal to act as an aggregation layer and to ease information repurposing?

As a conclusion we could say that Collaboration and Information Reuse are two distinct beasts. Even if they could share some common tools, they need to be correctly assessed individually. Unzipping a social suite on top of your previous intranet and spicing it up with some Web 2.0 features will simply not do it. Purely and simply replacing your old “knowledge bases” by some new E2.0 powered workspaces will certainly help you foster collaboration but certainly not improve knowledge transfer, reduce your information overload or build communication channels you can trust and rely upon.

So take care to not underestimate the weight of your information reuse strategy in regards of the new promises of social collaboration. Content interoperability will be key to your E2.0 success in the future, so make sure that you are not creating yet another content silo. Finally if correctly coupled with your social collaboration strategy, your WCM and Portal servers could definitively help you better reuse and value your existing content assets.