Online shared intelligence

About auto-censorship

This has to be one of the finest anecdotes I have heard in a long time. Perhaps everybody knows it, but nonetheless it’s excellent. Read the rest of this entry »

Intelligentsia 2.0

All buzzwords outlive their usefulness, and go from mandatory conversational drop-in to snobbish drop-out tag. That almost magical polarity change happens usually shortly after the buzzword in question is mercilessly extended beyond their original scope, until it’s left hanging ‘out there’, with little or no connection to the original meaning. Is that happening with the ‘2.0′ thingy? Read the rest of this entry »

What are the basic elements of Enterprise Collaboration?

A friend asked the question as she started the process of exploring her requirements for collaboration products, which she will use to support a social networking initiative she is about to get going.

Like many other practitioners before her, Lisa found that when it comes to enterprise collaboration, there is a huge difference between wanting to solve a problem and knowing what specific product features are relevant to your needs. In other words, if you want, say, “to empower collaboration in order to create alignment between highly distributed teams in order to improve the product cycle”, how does MySite functionality help you? If you want “to increase intimacy between partners and internal stakeholders”, is that something a blog, a wiki or a forum will produce? How relevant is a forms server to collaboration? Read the rest of this entry »

Enterprise collaboration: huge advances, some confusion

I have worked for the last eleven years on collaboration-related endeavors, working for early enabling vendors, exploratory startups and practitioners, and seen the field of collaboration go through a decisive evolution, from fuzzy-warm-feeling-term to widely adopted, hugely transformational product category. A balance after these years has to include:

•  Huge advances - Not a buzzword any more, collaboration will be one of the most important IT concerns for 2008, and has fierce grass-root adoption at the consumer level;
• Confusion - Now that it’s proven as a valid concern, collaboration has been wrapped together with too many other concerns, specially some coming from the communications side, and it’s easy to lose perspective of what is real (collaboration) and what is fodder (the always-hyper-connected workforce, communicating in twenty different channels and modalities at the same time, and at the same time having time to collaborate productively).

Here goes a timed perspective, from my eyes and memory, of some of what has happened in these last eleven years. Read the rest of this entry »