Let’s say you’re an executive at a larger size organization with around 100,000 employees and are looking to infuse your company with collaboration, where do you start?  Now, I don’t mean starting in term of  developing use cases or reviewing vendors.  I mean, which department or group do you start with if you want to do a controlled pilot?  Assuming you have around 50-100 departments how do you figure out where you should begin?  A bit of a daunting and intimidating task!

There are two approaches to this.

What others are doing

The first thing you can do is put together some research on what other companies in your vertical are doing.  For example if you run a hotel company you may want to see where Marriott or Hyatt hotels got started.  Not a bad approach when you think about it right?  I mean, if other companies in your industry are seeing benefits from deploying in a specific department then you should to?  It might be interesting to learn about what other companies in your industry are doing and how they are doing it, but it’s not a good idea to base your deployment decisions on what other companies are doing.  Why?  When it comes to collaboration organizations each take a unique path.  The variables are too great to just emulate what other companies are doing.  Corporate culture, overall company situation, internal politics, team structure, business needs and drivers are most likely all going to be unique for each organization (to name a few).  From working with and researching hundreds of companies at this point, I can safely say that while some broader trends may exist, for the most part, every company is a unique case.  It’s a bit like trying to become a great chef by reading the recipes of others.  Sure, this might give you some ideas and inspiration but at the end of the day the greatest chefs in the world are the one’s who can take ingredients and make a unique dish that they can call their own.

Ask your employees

Why bother trying to play guessing games when you can ask your employees?  Again, it’s great to know what other companies are doing around collaboration but the best way for you to decide on where to get started is by asking your employees.  This doesn’t need to be a very difficult process.  A corporate survey distributed by email which asks a few questions such as the one’s mentioned below should do the trick:

• What department are you in?
• Are you using collaborative tools at work?
• Are you seeing value from using these tools?

You might want to add/remove based on what makes sense for your organization, but just these three simple questions will tell you which department you should be looking at for a possible controlled pilot (assuming that a pilot is where you are going to be starting from vs an enterprise-wide deployment).  This approach is going to be the most accurate and more important the most relevant for your company.

I think uses cases and examples are always valuable.  They educate us, inspire us, and motivate us.  But, sometimes the answer to corporate problems can be found by asking those that work within our four walls.

As we’re nearing closer to the book launch date (July 9th) I’m going to be sharing more content around the book and also some announcements.  Today I’m happy to reveal who two of the contributors are to the foreword and afterword as well as what the book cover looks like!

Gil Yehuda wrote the foreword for my book.  I’ve known Gil for quite a few years now and he has become a good friend, mentor, and adviser on many things.  I couldn’t think of a better person to have open up this book than Gil.  He has inspired, encouraged, and always supported me.

Don Tapscott wrote the afterword for the book.  I’m sure many of you know Don as the best-selling author of Wikinomics and Macrowikinomics but he is also the chair of Moxie Insight.  Don has really been a visionary and thought leader on collaboration and how technology is changing our personal and business lives.

I’m so grateful to have both Don and Gil as contributors to the book!

The book cover is below.  I went through a few changes with the publisher who tried to be as accommodating as possible both with design and with layout.  At the end of the day I’m happy with what was created.  You can also see one of the endorsements that I am extremely proud to feature from the former CIO of the United States of America.  Lots of other updates and announcements are going to be coming as we approach the book launch date.  This is just the beginning!

This Wednesday the 16th at 10am PST Ben Haines, the CIO of Pabst Brewing Company will be joining me on a webinar to discuss some of the common collaboration problems that organizations face today.  We’re going to try to have a casual discussion around what obstacles organizations are running up against and how they are overcoming these obstacles.  The event is being powered by Cisco which is allowing us to host the event on their platform.

Here are the details taken from the event site:

Collaboration is not new. In fact, we have collaborated for thousands of years. However, organizations today are struggling to adapt to the change in behaviors and the advances in technology that employees are beginning to bring into the workplace – technologies and habits taken from their experiences with the consumer web. New collaboration platforms and strategies have permeated the organization, and executives and decision makers need help to navigate and make sense of it all to develop solid strategies to leverage its capabilities.

There are several common collaboration challenges that organizations are faced with today that they struggle to overcome.  Some examples include:

• Difficulty with finding the right people and information
• Employees disengaged with their company, and uninspired and unmotivated to do their job
• Lack of senior leadership support
• The “email culture”

During this 1 hour webinar on Wednesday, May 16th at 10am PT, join Jacob Morgan, Principal and co-Founder of Chess Media Group, and Ben Haines, CIO of Pabst Brewing Company as they talk about common collaboration problems, the challenges and successes they’ve encountered, and practical steps organizations can take to overcome their own challenges.
Click here to register for the event!

I (and many others) have spent a great deal of time talking about why organizations should invest their resources in collaboration tools and strategies.  But let’s assume for a moment that you didn’t.  How long do you realistically see your organization going on without making this investment; 1 year, 2 years, 3 years?  Do you really see your organization waiting this long?

At this point I have probably worked with, spoken with, and researched hundreds of companies and it’s rare to come across an organization that nothing in place when it comes to collaboration.  At the very least I run into organizations with some sort of a Sharepoint deployment or other collaboration software deployment.  But many of these organizations assume that the technology deployment alone is considered a “collaboration investment.”  That’s not the case.

What do I mean when I say invest in collaboration?

There are a couple parts to this which wall under two umbrellas, the technology side and the business side.

The Technology Side

When it comes to technology it’s already a given that some sort of tools need to be put in place but it doesn’t stop there.  Technology also needs to involve integration strategies, customization, employee feedback integration, upgrades, maintenance, design and usability.  The goal of these platforms is to have them act as the “front-door” to the enterprise so that employees can get everything they need from a single place.  As you can imagine, this requires more than just deploying a tool in isolation.

The Business Side

This is what many organizations tend to ignore.  ”Business” is a general term but to keep things simple I include everything that isn’t technology in this area.  This includes things such as developing use cases, evangelists, strategy development, employee adoption, measures of success, focusing on individual as well as corporate value, education and training, risk evaluation, and long term vision.  For many organizations it’s hard to focus on people in the context of how technology affects and enables them so oftentimes they deploy something and assume that employees will just figure it out.

Deploying a tool isn’t an investment in collaboration, it’s an investment in just that, a tool.  Collaboration is about people and the tools are just the enablers.  The next time the topic of collaboration comes up at your organization ask yourself if this is really something you are investing in.

I had the opportunity to have several in-depth conversations with John Rooney (CIO of Technical Strategy) and Ethan McCarty (Senior Manager, Digital and Social Strategy) of IBM.  The conversations resulted in our recently released case study on Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at IBM.  Here is an overview of that case study.

With over 420,000 employees in over 70 countries, IBM is one of the largest and most recognized companies in the world today.  A company of this size needs to be able to coordinate and collaborate, share business processes, and respond to market demands. In order to make this happen, IBM needs employees to be situated across various geographic areas that understand how things are done locally, but also understand the global IBM mission, vision, and strategic direction.  This means that employees are not only connected on the ground level, but also to IBM as an entity.

The collaboration business drivers for IBM came down to a few things:

• Globalization
• Changing demographics of the company. New and existing employees are
• expecting these types of tools and technologies to be in place.
• New employees are more acclimated to digital collaboration.
• Existing employees also have expectations which are being set by the
• commercial web
• Distributed digital leadership roles: Someone in LA, Michigan, Canabera
• Australia, tri-state area, Brazil, china, America, etc. need to have these
• connections and be able to work asynchronously
• Large size presents a knowledge management challenge

In the 90′s IBM almost went bankrupt and at that time they had the opportunity to really re-evaluate how things were getting done.  In fact many people don’t realize that IBM was one of the early enterprises out there to start building and using collaborative tools and technologies, they had something basic in place almost 30 years ago!  An entire team at IBM called Blue IQ helps salespeople to become expert collaborators.  IBM developed courses, training, policies, and guidelines for the entire enterprise that each employees needs to re-affirm every year.   IBM also acknowledged that senior level leadership was crucial to the success and these senior leaders are quite active on internal platforms.  What’s interesting is that IBM has a reverse mentoring program in place which pairs up someone considered to be an expert in social and collaborative technologies with an executive to discuss how social and collaboration can impact their business.

In short IBM’s strategic collaboration initiative has yielded several positive results:

• easier for employees to find and share information
• improved communication across the enterprise
• strategic alignment across the organization
• faster creation and action on content
• improved productivity

IBM actually had quite an interesting collaboration story.  To hear more about this story including usage statistics, change management obstacles, operational impact, technology adoption, and lessors learned, check out the full case study on Implementing Enterprise 2.0 at IBM.