Jacob Morgan asks this
question in his post, Collaboration in the 2.0 Enterprise. He begins with the
broad Wikipedia definition of collaboration. Then points out that while
collaborate may be relative simple when it involves a few people, what happens
when it involves a few thousand people as in the connected 2.0 enterprise?
Since it may be hard to
get everyone collaborating at once, how do you segment this into meaningful
groupings? He offers some possibilities such as by geography, departments, and
user created subgroups. Perhaps you might segment by feature sets or
functionality, as well as. In this case certain people get wikis or microblogs.
I think the answer is
all of the above. Most importantly, people in large organizations should have
the opportunities to form their own groups. This approach has meet with great
success at Booz Allen, for example.
Rather than organize collaboration along existing organizational charts
than are subject to change, they organize it around communities of interest
that reflect the capabilities of the organization and the needs of the market
it serves. This allows for organic growth.
Since people can join
more than one group they should also be able to collaborate in the many ways
they form groups within the enterprise. In some cases, this might be by
geography or department. A number of the collaboration suite allows for
multiple ways to look at content and connections.
I think that feature or
role use should be governed by task rather than role or position. Océ takes a proper approach as
they try to educate employees on when to use what enterprise 2.0 tool for what
purpose. Booz Allen takes a
similar approach with their change management efforts.
The challenges in
implementing enterprise 2.0 are more around question such as the one Jacob
raises to take proper advantage of the new capabilities the tools offer.
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