Collaborative Thinking

Share - Or Else...

Including information sharing skills and competencies as one facet of a review process is usually a good thing but it cannot be the only practice to encourage a more participatory environment. If improved information sharing was made possible simply through inclusion as a metric within performance evaluations we would have solved this problem decades ago. It's more complicated. But - when implemented properly, this can be a valid institutional approach. 

If federal employees do not personally adopt a policy of sharing intelligence information, they may soon face a poor performance review, the government's top information-sharing czar warned Monday at an intelligence conference.

Thomas McNamara, program manager for the Information Sharing Environment, told an audience gathered at the annual Department of Defense Intelligence Information System Conference that a mandate to share information that the intelligence community follows should be extended governmentwide.

If members of the intelligence community hinder the sharing of information with colleagues, managers can include such actions in annual performance reviews. McNamara said the same disincentive to not share information should be applied to all government employees so that the culture shifts from one based on "need to know" to "need to share."

"It would be a disaster for the country" if the culture of information sharing did not permeate all federal agencies, said McNamara, whom President Bush appointed in 2006 as head of information sharing, a job established by the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Protection Act.

Information czar calls for performance reviews to include sharing (3/18/08) -- www.GovernmentExecutive.com

Getting People On The Same Page

A challenge for many large organizations and not just vendors:

Tim O'Brien must have one of the more difficult jobs at Microsoft. As senior director of Microsoft Platforms, he is tasked with getting different parts of Microsoft to dance to the same tune. "Part of my role in the company is to help groups understand what the paths are," O'Brien said during an interview at Mix '08 earlier this month. "If the groups are heading down random paths, at the risk of oversimplification, we try to get on a common trajectory."

It sounds like a herding cats job. Microsoft has multiple platforms and agendas, and strong personalities. "The evangelism organization was conceived to get people to adopt technology when it doesn't necessarily seem rational, when there are no tools or documentation. Evangelism can help envision the possibilities. My role is to look at up and coming technology in the product groups and piece together an end-to-end story for developers and create a call to action," O'Brien explained.

Herding cats at Microsoft | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com

Unlocking the DNA of the Adaptable Workforce

Worth reading this blog post summarizing a panel session at the Human Capital Institute Summit. One word repeats itself several times - "collaboration":

As our panel of experts, Bill Craib VP of HCI Communities, Amy Lewis, Director of the Talent Acquisition Community, Joy Kosta, Director HCI Communities and Christine Abbatiello, Director of the Talent Strategy Community all from the Human Capital Institute settle in, the room grows full.

These experts are speaking today about: “Unlocking the DNA of the Adaptable Workforce”. This session is being moderated by Denis Brousseau, Partner, IBM Global Business Services. IBM is also sponsoring this session, you can feel the excitement as the discussion prepares to start!

Experts discuss "Unlocking the DNA of the Adaptable Workforce" at the Human Capital Institute Summit. « 2008 Human Capital Summit Blog

Organizational Effectiveness

Came across my feeds, several interesting points:

IBM CIO Interaction Channel

The new collaboration: Enabling innovation, changing the workplace

While companies see the value of innovation, they frequently fail to put the right tools in place to support those goals. The new collaboration will be built on technologies that enable easy knowledge sharing outside the firewall.

Achieving tangible business benefits with social computing

By collecting and sharing the knowledge scattered throughout departments, companies can better leverage this collective intelligence within the enterprise.

People and innovation: Getting ideas on the table

Many organizations find it difficult to engage their people in the innovation process. Where should they start?

IBM - CIO Interaction Channel - Organizational Effectiveness - Research and insights

Novell Acquires SiteScape - Will It Make A Difference?

This was obvious since the OEM agreement last year. I remain skeptical. On paper, this can be viewed as being "conceptually perfect" - SiteScape has always been noted in the industry for having powerful functionality but for a variety of reasons, the platform never gained large market traction or mindshare. Novell, with its Groupwise platform, was once a collaboration powerhouse alongside IBM and Microsoft back in the nineties. But again, for a variety of reasons, the Groupwise platform has lost market traction and mindshare - at least in the medium-to-large enterprise space that I am familiar with.

ICEcore - an open source effort - has seen little activity at all. It's tough to imagine developers getting excited about an open source effort to improve a platform that is already feature-rich. When I think about this open source effort compared to Zimbra or others it still seems very much in the back of the pack.

The only tactics I can see here to turn things around would be:

• Novell aggressively pushes the SaaS aspects of SiteScape (WebWorkZone)
• Novell becomes very clear on the roadmap for Groupwise / SiteScape alignment and/or convergence
• Novell partners with someone in need of collaboration technology (my best guess would be perhaps Cisco and its WebEx Connect efforts)
• Novell develops a consumer/SoHo/small business angle here similar to other hosted offerings such as Basecamp, Huddle, etc.
• Consider integrating with Google Apps

February 13, 2008: Novell Delivers Open Collaboration with SiteScape Acquisition

Novell today announced it has acquired SiteScape, a leader in open source team collaboration, extending Novell's leadership in, and commitment to, innovative and open collaboration solutions. SiteScape, the founder of the ICEcore open source collaboration project, brings impressive team workspace and real-time collaboration capabilities to Novell – key components of a broad unified communications and collaboration strategy. The melding of the two firms creates the industry's clear leader in open, enterprise-strength collaboration and social networking offerings, giving customers powerful, flexible ways to integrate new communications technologies into their environment and drive employee productivity and business innovation.

.....

Founded in 1995, SiteScape provides collaborative solutions for communication and management for distributed teams across a wide range of business and government customers. SiteScape's integrated Web-based solutions support knowledge management, project management, communities of practice, telework, business and government continuity, and many other workflow-driven functions. Long a leader in enterprise e-mail with GroupWise®, Novell partnered with SiteScape in 2007 to add to its collaboration portfolio with Novell® Teaming + Conferencing, a team workspace and real-time conferencing solution centered on the ICEcore open source technology. Consistent with Novell's commitment to interoperabilty, Novell Teaming + Conferencing runs on both Linux* and Windows*, and works with Lotus Notes* and Microsoft Exchange*, in addition to GroupWise. These team workspaces, accessible securely by team members both inside and outside the company, incorporate multiple integrated collaboration tools, including blogs, wikis, instant message, chat, voice over IP and web conferencing, providing the powerful core of a unified communications and collaboration solution. By now acquiring SiteScape, Novell strengthens its commitment to the technology, gains the flexibility to create the solutions customers and partners need, and increases its capacity to deliver even more innovation and interoperability around open collaboration.

Novell Delivers Open Collaboration with SiteScape Acquisition

February 14, 2007: Novell Strengthens Workgroup Portfolio with Team Workspace and Real-Time Collaboration Offerings

Novell has entered an OEM licensing agreement with SiteScape (www.sitescape.com) – an innovator in software that integrates team workspaces with presence-based, real-time collaboration – to offer these new products. The Novell offerings are expected to be available later this year, and product names will be announced at a later date.

Novell Strengthens Workgroup Portfolio with Team Workspace and Real-Time Collaboration Offerings

Meanwhile, Over At WebEx: A New Sheriff In Town

Cisco has gone a little quiet regarding WebEx Connection, collaboration beyond unified communications and building out the partner ecosystem (channel and technology vendors) that will drive success for its composite application platform. The story below provides some insight:

Making sure that Cisco’s sales teams are motivated to sell WebEx services has just become the responsibility of a new general manager at the on-demand Web meeting provider. The sudden departure late last year of Cisco’s former chief development officer Charlie Giancarlo, who had been widely regarded as heir-apparent to succeed John Chambers, led to a rapid reshuffle of top management at Cisco. That meant promotion for Don Proctor, who’d been general manager at WebEx for just three months, and who now reports directly to Chambers on all of Cisco’s software products. Four weeks ago Doug Dennerline (pictured) took over as senior VP of the collaboration software group and thus the new general manager of WebEx.

.....

Dennerline outlined four main priorities that he sees for WebEx this year.

• Get Cisco’s sales team selling the WebEx service
• Finish preparations for a production launch of WebEx Connect, the company’s on-demand collaboration and composite applications platform
• Harness Cisco’s partner channel to sell WebEx
• Tap Cisco’s resources to bolster research and development of new WebEx services

» Taking the reins and tending the cows at WebEx | Software as Services | ZDNet.com

Integrating SharePoint And Confluence

Very thorough article and worth reading if you are trying to leverage existing SharePoint investments but take advantage of one of the better wiki platforms in the market. It would be valuable for Microsoft to continue down this path of providing well-defined and public interfaces (as opposed to vendor point-to-point deals) so that other blog and wiki vendors could integrate with the platform. While Confluence is popular, customers should be able to integrate other blog and wiki vendors as well(e.g., MindTouch, Six Apart's Moveable Type, Socialtext, Traction Software, and WordPress). Microsoft should avoid the appearance of dictating to customers what options they have for third-party integration and would be better off letting the partner ecosystem act in a more viral and customer-driven manner.

SharePoint Connector for Confluence - How We Did It

A few months ago, we and Atlassian announced their SharePoint Connector for Confluence, which impressed both customers and analysts. Now, ThreeWill, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in developing SharePoint-based solutions, which helped design and implement the SharePoint Connector, will describe how they did it.

<Lawrence />

Integrating Content and Search Results with SharePoint

Have you ever needed to integrate an external system with SharePoint, showing content from each system within the other? What if you needed to integrate search between SharePoint and the external system? How do you keep the user experience seamless if the systems use different authentication mechanisms? Have you wondered if this can be done if the external system is written in Java?

If you answered "yes," then read on. Along the way you will learn some of the internals of SharePoint 2007 web parts, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 enterprise search, and Microsoft Single Sign-on (SSO).

Overview

This blog entry discusses how three developers integrated MOSS 2007 with Confluence, an enterprise wiki, in about 2 months time. It discusses work behind implementing the features for the SharePoint Connector for Confluence as shown in the diagram below.

Those features are broken out as follows:

Feature	Primary Technology
Content Embedding	Web Parts
Integrated Search	MOSS Enterprise Search
Single Sign-On (SSO)	Microsoft SSO Service

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog : SharePoint Connector for Confluence - How We Did It

Mindquarry's commercial offerings end

Too bad... hopefully the open source effort will continue and gain some market traction.

Discontinuing commercial offerings

Much to our regret, we must inform you that the company Mindquarry will stop providing commercial services and products. We could not convince our investor to keep financing our endeavour.

The Mindquarry GO and Mindquarry PRO products will be discontinued as of today. Our Open Source product will remain publicly available (see below for more information).

.....

Keeping our Open Source software alive

Our developers team is currently working on finishing the Mindquarry 1.2beta release, which will be available around end of October. Beginning with 1.2beta, Mindquarry source code will be hosted on Sourceforge as well as the mindquarry.com Web site. Hence, our software as well as all necessary information such as installation documentation and forum discussions will still be available. Further details and links will be available in the next and probably final Mindquarry community newsletter.

Issue #9: Mindquarry's commercial offerings end | Mindquarry | The Open Source Collaborative Software

A Seesmic Shift For Enterprises?

Intriguing application: 

Seesmic is an extension of the general idea that enterprise doesn’t have to be dull but can include a fun element while encouraging people to dream up fresh uses. I believe that represents a significant step in making social computing a productivity builder. My sense is that Seesmic has the ingredients for creating a powerful medium that takes the best of Twitter (real time connections to people who matter to you) and adding the video ‘edge.’ Why should this matter?

The written word is a powerful thing but doesn’t always convey the meaning an individual would like to convey. Video solves that problem because you can both see and hear the nuances around a specific statement. Then there is that old saying: ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ Twitter gives you 140 characters. Some will argue that video conferencing provides that facility in a live, real-time setting. True. As the world of work moves more towards problem solving, individuals who are working in dispersed teams will need a better means of personal interaction. In many situations, that requires little more than a few moments with a colleague to help get something done. Seesmic could facilitate that far faster than Twitter and a quantum leap faster than email.

» Seesmic for enterprise? | Irregular Enterprise | ZDNet.com

Building a Culture of Collaboration

An age-old truism: tools help (sometimes to a great degree), but organizational dynamics trump technology in terms of establishing effective collaboration efforts.

The article below makes some credible points but I would disagree on how much direct influence HR organizations have on how well employees engage each other. There are many areas where HR activities can be derailed by line management, local supervisors or even sabotaged by conflicting agendas across business units. HR is a critical part of the organization often overlooked when collaboration strategies are put together - that is clear from my experience. And HR can certainly help set the context for cultural change and address broader workplace issues through different HR-related programs. But the organizational dynamics, of which culture is one aspect, need to be recognized and addressed by everyone (senior management, local management, employees themselves, etc.). The opportunity for HR teams to redefine themselves (from an administrative function to a strategic partner for other business units) is immense given shifting employee demographic trends and the battle for talent in the marketplace that will occur over the next decade.

In the May 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review, James R. Detert of Cornell University and Amy C. Edmondson of Harvard discuss reasons employees are reluctant to share creative ideas to improve products, processes or performance. Based on 200 interviews, they conclude that many employees, without justification, feel uncomfortable sharing their ideas: "Making employees feel safe enough to contribute fully requires deep cultural change that alters how they understand the likely costs (personal and immediate) versus benefits (organizational and future) of speaking up."

Research suggests that to achieve collaboration results, knowledge-sharing companies must assess their culture, no matter what technologies they adopt. If not, "you are going nowhere," says Smith. HR has a clear role to play in that endeavor, says Bob Armacost, national knowledge leader at KPMG International, a Swiss cooperative whose members provide audit, tax and advisory services.

Top HR executives must be involved when companies design collaboration strategies. "They can think of incentive programs, educational programs and change management to facilitate knowledge management and collaboration," says Armacost. KPMG's top HR executive is a member of the firm's knowledge advisory team, Armacost notes.

In the years ahead, the winning organizations will be those that learn to be collaborative and share employees' knowledge.

CIO Issues - Building a Culture of Collaboration