Hyoun,

Yes, as Deb Lavoy says, collaboration isn’t considered normal, it’s more management by fear.
But this doesn’t change the fact that we have wicked problems or need to draw on others not on our teams to get things done
http://bit.ly/9XPzbD

We collaborate the best we can to cope in dealing with our issues…we have a barter organisation (you help me I help you)

As you allude to the organisation needs to notice how we cope using email to do ad-hoc collaboration, and how much more effective this could be using new social tools.

Yes sub-optimal ways to tap into information, filter it, add value…and sub-optimal ways to handle exceptions. I really like flexible tools like Traction Software that create a more optimal way for you do design bottom-up ad-hoc processes.

At the same time this learned behaviour needs to be not an objective, but a practiced value from the top-down, just like safety and quality.

Some things to iron out are work group fatigue and how we are appraised in working collaboratively
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2009/12/17/the-roi-of-time-spent-helping-others-and-performance-reviews/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2009/11/23/work-group-fatigue-level-of-effort-vs-funded-or-transform-the-organisation/

What are your thoughts in these two links above Olivier

You might want to consider Marketing as the technics that bridges the gap between supply-side / economies of scale driven economy and demand-side / long tail economy, whereby segmentation is a communication strategy and marginal customization is a production strategy. Bridge because it is right between one and the other.

Re, my Scribd piece, I wanted to address people who make decisions and don’t quite relate things as they keep on assimilating KM and social computing to operational matters. The Knowledge-based view of the firm remains poorly regarded, that is precisely why “Enterprise 2.0″ makes no impact.

PS: for God’s sake, please change your captcha!

Totally correct, the big picture is now a demand driven economy.

It still is but was even more so the case that consumers are victims of economies of scale, and homogenity (any colour as long as it’s black), as over surplus means a need to create demand via marketing.

But I think all this is changing where the customer has specific needs (products/services need to be modular and accommodating), they even co-create, and they trust each other (eg. travel reviews by other customers)

Thx for your Scribd piece, I am familiar with this and may review it one day, as it’s very high level.

Interesting post!

I will surface just two elements of it:

1) When Ross Mayfield says that “Most employees don’t spend their time executing business process. That’s a myth. They spend most of their time handling exceptions to business process.” he just recognises that we are out of the supply driven economy (that leads to stable bureaucratic forms of management) and have entered a demand driven economy. Quality Management literature is all about that, for 30 years now. The reason why we pay people and not implement sophisticated processes is that Humans are agile in the sense that they have the ability to handle unanticipated issues, whether it is future or specificity of a customer request. People are necessary, because knowledge is necessary.

2) Email and Attachment are imperfect and temporary technological arrangements, that survive only by routine. They are not perfect as a) this duplicates content and makes reconciliation difficult and 2) this hides individual contribution (aka versioning). Social computing is a useful complement to Email and Attachment as it helps addressing the “making of” by centralising and versioning the content. Other attributes of social computing tools such as notifications prove helpful to speed the co-ordination up. All those elements are useful to embed knowledge management in work-related activity.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/13908244/The-Adaptation-of-Organisations-to-a-Knowledge-Economy-and-the-Contribution-of-Social-Computing

You talk about adoption of these tools which is another post I may review in the future. Yes a change to work-in-progress sharing and communicating.
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/03/11/km-20-doing-your-job-or-giving-back-to-the-organisation/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/02/25/the-value-of-networked-free-form-publishing/

Just quickly I think one path to adoption is facilitating the use of these tools to fix burning issues. How can we communicate better, how can we troubleshoot better, how can we do document review better, how can we fix processA better

And also it’s key to have activists and a few senior people as role-models so they can be an influence on others

…don’t try and boil the ocean…just infect a few and let the virus do its thing. If people see successes from their peers they will want some of that.

The key challenge as I see it in my company is adoption of such tools by the baby boomers who still feel comfortable sending emails to a small target audience rather than the community who can collaborate/benefit/answer. Also I totally agree with you that E2.0 tools provide a platform to create ad-hoc process for “management by exception” situations however exceptions typically is a reflection of process (and people) broken and at least in our 30,000 people company folks are reluctant to want to talk about such issues in an open forum. Rather they will talk about success therefore the E2.0 platform is becoming a tool for folks to cleverly share (selectively) their achievements- you could argue that’s a good thing, but it’s missing the mark on what the purpose for such a tool is.

The people aspect and adoption strategies are areas I will like to hear more about,