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The Importance of Online Workplaces
Online workplaces are involved in virtually all information- or knowledge-based activities within an enterprise. By improving online workplaces, an enterprise can significantly increase the performance of these activities. However, the goals of an online workplace need to go beyond automation. When aligned with supporting culture and business practices, online workplaces can provide the basis for sustainable competitive advantage. The source of this advantage comes from the intellectual capital that can be captured and reused.
The efficiency of completing repeatable processes and transactions is the focus of workflow systems and transactional systems. In the interest of decreasing cycle time, both of these system types optimize how individuals and groups serve business processes: The process comes first and the worker is subservient to the process (cue Pink Floyd music). However, this “process first, user second” design does not work well for the many ad hoc activities that make up a typical workday, in which the user juggles multiple variables and gathers information as needed. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid call these two different modes “process” and “practice.”
Advantages based on practice are difficult to replicate because they consist of talent of the people involved and information with which those workers make decisions. This goes to the heart of the goal of an effective online workplace: Enable the enterprise to leverage assets that competitors do not have. These are the talent of its people and information only the enterprise possesses.
Front End of Innovation: Encourgaging Collaboration and Innovation in your Organization
Support networks. Build social networks to help employees that have problems find those who can provide a solution to it.
Build collaboration into your employee evaluation system. Be able to reward employees not only for developing and processing an innovative idea or technology but for spreading it as well.
Encourage curiosity. Allow employees some time to spend on personal projects. It will give them ample time to develop new ideas outside of their work focus.
Create innovation funds. Create an alternative source in which employees can go to for funding of innovation projects.
Don't underestimate the value of physical proximity. Make it easier for employees in different departments to visit each other. If this means having a free shuttle service then so be it.
The year of the shift to Enterprise 2.0
As depicted in the figure above, which lays out the spectrum of most enterprise knowledge creation and flow today, important new channels have been added to the corporate mix in recent years. Channels that are just starting to be used. Blogs, wikis, and activity streams (those event lists in apps like Facebook and Twitter that tell you what’s happening in near real-time) in particular are changing how knowledge workers express themselves and work with each other. The intrinsic design of these tools creates much more of a usable, accessible information ecosystem than traditional tools. These traditional tools can create powerful, local information flows but little build-up of value over time or collective intelligence. In other words, the new social tools change enterprise knowledge flow by making it more social, more open and public, discoverable, and ultimately, the most leverageable.
Note: I somewhat reluctantly included ECM in this list since the latest crop of ECM tools are adding much of the emergent, freeform, and social aspect that makes Enterprise 2.0 apps so distinct, powerful, and engaging. Just be warned that most off-the-shelf ECM today is not going to enable Enterprise 2.0 outcomes.
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