Several weeks ago I ran across an article from November of 2001 on the Darwin Magazine web site written by Scott Kirsner. Entitled "Culture of Collaboration", Kirsner begins by recognizing the trending, again, of collaboration within most organizations. We all know that we need to do it, but it seems as if many struggle to achieve the promise of enterprise collaboration. But what really struck me was his ten commandments near the bottom of the article.
When I was a management consultant with then Coopers & Lybrand Consulting, I was unwittingly sucked into the enterprise deployment of Lotus Notes. C&L's CIO, Ellen Knapp, had the foresight and incredible wisdom to buy Lotus Notes for the entire organization, then embark on many of the tenets offered in Kirsner's article. That was back in 1995! It was a huge success and four of Kirsner's key bullets really ring true, even more so today:
- Start Small/Pick a Real Problem: Indeed, make the technology available to anyone that wants it in the enterprise, but make each requesting business unit present a business use case. I was in C&L's Federal unit providing consulting to the US Department of Defense and various intelligence organizations. The partner who ran our unit had to request Notes licenses by offering the business use case before HQ would budge. In addition to insuring people had "pain", it created MASSIVE buzz, thereby driving demand across the practices.
- Fill the Space: There is nothing worse than an empty collaborative space, void of data or initial ideas. What could be worse is merely providing a bucket of fixed web-based tools designed to everyone's needs, but meeting no one's needs. Discussion databases and file sharing databases rarely saw the light of day in the initial C&L deployment because there wasn't much incremental value, nor did they provide viral uptake. Context, at the time was the rule. Today it's context plus adaptiveness. Provide tools that smell like my business pain while providing extensibility as my upstream and downstream practices morph with the marketplace.
- Celebrate the Experts: C&L went to great efforts to publicize the business units that achieved business "wins" because of the new technology, but also recognized those individual change agents that served as the provacateurs of the day. They never wasted time going after the spuds that didn't get it, they celebrated the brains that did.
- Let the Users Rule: Indeed. Value serendipity, chaos, and the stochastic interactions between people. Let them self-organize around the just-in-time interactions that drives down the organizational cost-of-connection.
10:15:13 PM 
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