These are interesting times for the enterprise buyer of collaboration technologies, with an unprecedented range of products available to fit a huge variety of business sizes and issues.
The challenge in this era is in identifying what problems you will successfully solve with these technologies. This is frequently a harder issue than it first appears, and at the heart of strategic planning is the state of tension between business process and practice.
This quote from ‘Knowledge Directions‘ magazine nine years ago by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid encapsulates the core problem:
Visually, we think of process as a vertical structure creating an organizational spine out of the myriad practices the organization comprises. Contrastingly, we see practice as horizontal.
That is, process emphasizes the hierarchical, explicit command-and-control side of organization—the structure that gets things done. Practice emphasizes the lateral connections within an organization, the implicit coordination and exploration that, for its part, produces things to do.
The top down knowledge management era back then aimed to propagate knowledge processes through expensive enterprise ‘learning management systems’, which were all too frequently relegated to shelf ware after purchase.
A fundamental reason for failed uptake of these systems maps to the tension between how knowledge in organizations was generated in practice but implemented through process. In other words hoovering up knowledge gleaned from practice and packaging it up as prescriptive learning processes was a labor intensive business with questionable results.
The challenge of capturing unstructured data in the present day is being addressed by the Enterprise 2.0 movement and others, but there is little distinction or recognition of the state of tension between command and control process and the practice of execution – in fact the fashion in more naive circles is to suppose that vertical management will go away, to be replaced by an egalitarian business world unsullied by hierarchy.
There is also scant understanding of scale, as I wrote about last week over on ZDNet:
Small and medium business needs are typically very different to ‘enterprise’, which in general business usage tends to refer to companies with over one hundred million in revenue. This can also be misleading however since many ‘enterprises’ are in fact federations of autonomous smaller business units.
As I’ve discussed previously, planning at an appropriate scale and for anticipated growth or shrinkage is critical to the success over time of a collaboration environment. It’s relatively trivial these days to set up a ’software as a service’ browser based, pay-as-you-go collaborative environment, and/or on premise wikis, but driving efficient uptake and usage is a much more substantial task. Technology, while not trivial, isn’t really the issue: culture change is.
These two issues of process vs practice and tolerances and scale bedevil enterprise buyers attempting to get their heads around a viable collaboration strategy. Scope creep- ‘if we are going to install this technology for division X, can we stretch it to use it for departments Y and Z also?’ – can capsize the original envisaged capacity, which can make it hard to find the acceptable boundaries of what you are attempting to achieve.
Against this background the new larger scale players entering the space – Cisco, Salesforce – and the existing ones – Microsoft, Lotus – are the higher end. The mid level is companies such as Jive and Telligent with a myriad of modular point solutions filling out the base.
The question for the enterprise buyer is when and how well these higher end solutions will roll up the innovations of the more agile end of the market, and how effective (or necessary) integration with existing and planned enterprise technology will be. Making durable purchasing decisions that capitalize on a ‘right’ time in the marketplace to launch can be a tough call.
The biggest issue of all is effectively mapping to agreed business goals the desired behavior patterns of system users after you’ve got your technology underpinning up and running.
Planning for specific people in an organization and their contextual processes can take into account associated practice, but this has to be consciously achieved.
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