I did some catching up on my reading over the last holidays. One book at the top of the pile was Rawn Shah’s Social Networking for Business: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs. Rawn is best practices lead in the Social Software Enablement team in IBM Software Group. He was kind to give me a review copy. In this book Rawn brings together patterns and best practices based on his experience managing worldwide online communities at IBM. He makes the case that for online communities to succeed they must be guided and nurtured carefully, actively, and intelligently. I can certainly agree with this position.
Rawn begins with examples of collective intelligence including IBM’s Innovation Jams. The 2006 one drew 150,000 business partners. I wrote a bit about the 2005 Jam that drew 52,000 IBM employees. The paper, World Jam: Talk Among 50,000+ describes the event. They built a Jam Analyzer to help visualize what is happening and enable you to drill down on specific participants and conversations. IBM has invested over $100 million to develop new businesses in each of themes that emerged such as improved healthcare and work toward a smarter planet.
Rawn notes that other companies are also adopting the use of collective intelligence and supporting it through social media. He writes that the trick is to focus on specific goals and methods instead of just looking at innovation in a general way.
He next goes on to look at examples of Web sites such as last.fm and social tools such as IBM’s Quickr that enable community based work. I was a big fan of Lotus Quickplace as Quickr was called when it first came out and promoted it with a number of clients. In 2000 I worked on the implementation of a knowledge management system at Ryder that used Quickplace as an important component that was novel for the time. This implementation won a CIO 100 award for innovation in 2002. Quickplace foreshadowed some of the enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools providing a quick and easy way to set up a web-based team workplace. Here is a 2006 post on the Quickplace Story – Then and Now.
The collective experience is not one-dimensional and Rawn provides a very useful set of models. They include individual (e.g. SlideShare), social network (e.g., LinkedIn), closed workgroup (e.g., Quickr), visible workgroup (e.g., Pandora), community (e.g., SAP Developer Network), and mass collaboration (e.g., last.fm or Amazon). See Four Examples of Wikis Working within the Enterprise for more on the SAP example and similar efforts. Rawn goes on to use this set of models to discuss their value and how to support them.
Rawn next discusses effective leadership in social environments. The old command and control methods do not work. Again he offers a range of different leadership styles and discusses how each relates to collaboration. The same careful and useful detail is offered. He then goes into different models of the social tasks related to collaboration. This is followed by a discussion of the different social domains, again using the approach of defining and discussing alternatives.
Building a social culture is the next topic. He discusses how the social leadership and social tasks already covered impact culture. This discussion continues with chapters on engaging members and community management. Next Rawn tackles how to measure social environments with same degree of precision, again exploring alternatives. He concludes with a discussion of social value. I highly recommend this book as it offers very specific and clear guidelines for anyone wanting to engage in social collaboration and that should be all of us.
Rawn currently writes the Connected Business blog at Forbes. Tomorrow I will comment on a recent interview he did with Don Tapscott, The Industrial Age Has Finally Run Out of Gas, where he continues to discuss collective intelligence.
its a great things that The collective experience is not one-dimensional and Rawn provides a very useful set of models.
Posted by: Network Analyzer calibration | January 11, 2012 at 12:26 AM