I wrote a while back about why corporate managers might have a hard time getting comfortable with Enterprise 2.0 tools and approaches:
"We need to keep in mind that most E2.0 tools are new, and that their acceptance depends on shifts in perspective on the part of business leaders and decision makers, shifts for which the word ‘seismic’ might not be an overstatement. Enterprise 2.0 tools have no inherent respect for organizational boundaries, hierarchies, or job titles…"
I met a little while back with the leaders of a startup E2.0 company who showed me that those words were a little hasty and naive, and that vendors are coming up with tools that have some respect for existing organization structures, yet still foster freeform and emergent collaboration.
Awareness Networks builds, hosts, and deploys integrated E2.0 suites for an impressive roster of customers (I have no financial interest in Awareness, and have received no compensation from the company). These suites include a variety of tools for both user-generated content and social networking, and are hosted by Awareness and integrated into a customer’s existing infrastructure for security and permissions.
As CEO John Bruce, CTO and co-founder David Carter, and VP of Marketing Eric Schurr walked me through their company and its offerings I found myself nodding along and saying to myself "Yep. Yep. Good idea. Good idea…" When they described how neighborhoods work within Awareness, I think I said "Great idea!" out loud.
Each Awareness installation is called a ‘community,’ and each community can contain multiple neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are simply ways to categorize the content that gets contributed over time, and are defined in advance by the people who commissioned the site. Since these people are usually the bosses of the company (or are at least acting on their behalf) neighborhoods tend to reflect the formal organizational structure or goals of the company, or some combination of the two.
For example, a purely internal community (one that doesn’t include customers or suppliers) might have neighborhoods devoted to Sales, Marketing, R&D, ‘Suggestions,’ and ‘Our Values.’ An internal + external community might include neighborhoods like ‘Next Generation Products’ and ‘User Conference 2008.’ Bosses can control who has the ability to view, comment, edit, post, and vote by neighborhood. People can blog, contribute to wikis, participate in polls, votes, and discussions, upload photos and videos, etc. within any of these neighborhoods. Search, tagging, and linking work across all the content that a user can access, regardless of neighborhood.
An Awareness community therefore has both imposed and emergent structure, in what feels to me like the right proportions. Neighborhoods are tools for bosses to impose, up front, how they want content to be categorized. Users, however, probably don’t feel like this is too much of an imposition. They can still author, edit, link, and tag to their heart’s content; they’re just doing so underneath headings that have been specified in advance. So for example the VP of Marketing will probably blog within her neighborhood, but in a well-designed community anyone can find it, read it, link to it, or add a comment.
By categorizing content, neighborhoods make communities easier to navigate and digest, and so make them appear friendlier to their users. I think the bigger benefit, though, might well be that neighborhoods make Enterprise 2.0 environments appear friendlier to bosses. Neighborhoods let bosses impose a bit of structure on what can otherwise seem like a formless and lawless environment, the online equivalent of an untamed frontier. Neighborhoods provide bosses with assurance that things will be orderly rather than chaotic.
It seems like this would be a good thing. What do you think? Leave a comment and tell us what you think of the concept of neighborhoods – would it help to spur E2.0 adoption within your company?
{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
Understood but “bosses” can’t anticipate everything up front. By limiting high-level page creation and editing to bosses you essentially replicate the limited “webmaster” model of the mid-90s (a very small group of categorizers can categorize).
It also imposes “lanes in the road” by limiting knowledge creation only to your day job or title. What if you have a great suggestion for the R&D department but can’t comment because you are in HR? How does this type of system help the company move toward “above the flow” knowledge generation and expose issues to widest range of talent?
My worry is bosses will “categorize” the high-level content and then will rarely make edits. The “chaotic” perception of E 2.0, in many cases, is a view not grounded in the day-to-day reality of actually using the tools. Instead of using the E 2.0 tools at work, many bosses make “what if” claims based on worst-case scenario hearsay about Wikipedia and blog flaming on the internet.
This system sounds a lot like the intelligence community’s need-to-know culture. A boss knows up front how your mind works and what data you need to see to do your job.
I’m very familiar with this model from being involved with the community surrounding the open-source CMS Drupal A community site for collaboration around Drupal was built at groups.drupal.org
There anyone can form a group. Groups are typically formed either as work groups (e.g. for people working together on a particular piece of functionality of Drupal — <a href=”http://groups.drupal.org/drupaled-distro”>Drupal in Education</a>, Drupal for Newspapers, this one for Utah). At the moment there are 435 active groups and 5-10,000 group members.
Dividing the larger Drupal community into smaller more specialized communities works out great as it provides a findable destination for interested people and “shelters” conversations that’s on a more narrow scope.
I agree with Chris that employees shouldn’t be restricted where they can write/comment.
One more thought. It might be beneficial to allow employees to create sub-neighborhoods (houses?). Perhaps someone over the Google Adwords account in the marketing department might want to create a Adwords “house” to support collaboration within their adwords group and invite suggestions from outside the group.
Sub-groups would help maintain an “emergent” feel to the intranet while keeping the larger neighborhoods tidy.
So we are using tools designed to increase co-operation and information sharing within a firm, and imposing a structure upon them before they are released.
Couple of things to note. First, co-operation and internal knowledge generation within the enterprise is considered to be the single most significant factor to innovation and rates as more significant than external co-operation and knowledge spillover (whether informal or due to labour force mobility). Hence by imposing a structure, we could well be limiting the co-operative benefits of such tools.
Second, by imposing a structure based upon the existing organisation we could end up increasing social cohesion. This could increase resistance to adoption of any significant innovation, as well as remove opportunities for innovation.(though as you pointed out – you can solve with devil’s advocates)
Overall, these neighbourhoods sound better than “not using E2.0″ and at the very least they come with added confidence boosters. It’s not a bad thing if it helps a company mobilize “the intellectual resources of all employees in the service of the firm”.
I would like to see 1 “simple and powerful” solution to support every user within a domain.com
The VP of Marketing should share/ask about anything (esp. in Marketing) and if many in Marketing (or followers) find something interesting, it can become visible to others interested in that topic in general
The software/solution should take care of letting people amplify signals rather than creating multiple neighbourhoods..
As a metaphor, “neighborhood” is great.
However, as you’ve pointed out recently, unless you integrate a neighborhood into existing business flows, it’s likely to fail to reach critical mass and die of urban decay.
Andrew has captured the concept here. If you want a deeper description, you can find it on the Resources page of the Awareness website at http://www.awarenessnetworks.com/resources/
The Neighborhood concept is just one organizational construct; it does not have to be the only one. For example, you can have Neighborhoods that are defined as part of the structure of the community, but also have another construct (let’s call it “groups”) that can be invoked by a community member at any time (you might also think of this as “buddies” or “friends” lists). In this way the community can have an organizational model that gives the community some structure, but also allow community members to form their own organizational units within and across Neighborhoods.
Once again you have posted another great article. I could not agree more with you. As mentioned earlier employee’s should never be restricted where they can write/comment.
- Dwayne Charrington.
http://www.dwaynecharrington.com
Yes, that is right. Here in EU we also use Drupal Groups and some more examples. But building groups/neighborhoods like you mention is really a step to far here in The Netherlands.
Great article. Building groups is relevant now. Drupal Groups is good decision, but there are a lot of other possibilities. I prefer to use my own developments for building gropus/comminities.
A mix of loose and tight structure makes perfect sense. In the 7 years of training and advice I’ve helped to provide in Taxonomy, Information Architecture, and Search (and content deployed into a Portal, or through a Web Content Management system), even the most formal organizers/taxonomists (or corporate librarians, webmasters, etc.) can see the benefit of having loose and minimal ties at certain levels of the structure, rather than “pure” and rigid hierarchical structures.
The addition of an escape hatch (tagging or other free-form organization) that allows the more dynamic nature of work to “flow” keeps the formal structure from breaking content creation and distribution to the point where “1.0″ sites (whether public or inward-facing) find themselves, namely with DEAD sites.
Providing JUST tagging (by the masses) seems to provide the same sort of disincentive that a blank wiki can provide. Nowhere to go, because nothing yet exists, and there are simply barriers that some people won’t cross, namely, to be the first ones to splash the ink around.
“Dividing the larger Drupal community into smaller more specialized communities works out great as it provides a findable destination for interested people and “shelters†conversations that’s on a more narrow scope.”
I could not agree more with you as said above we have started small groups,neighborhood awareness networks classs here in west yorkshire united kingdom and hope to go on to better things in building groups,comminities
Brent Parkinson
http://www.ebooknetworking.com
Good point about community. Whether you are in a small business or large corporation, you have to have the small groups. I worked for an environmental engineering firm that was very effective due to the close knit network and effective use of technology. Not sure on Drupal though.
Small groups idea sounds very effective. And it hasn’t been a secret. But i think dividing the drupal community can be a problem. Because there’s no specific way of dividing on it. That’s the key which brings you to the hole.
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I absolutely agree. In order to be effective, you need to establish personal relationships. I can think of no better way way than through tight-knit communities.
Great article. Building groups is relevant now. Drupal Groups is good decision, but there are a lot of other possibilities. I prefer to use my own developments for building gropus/comminities.
I absolutely agree. In order to be effective, you need to establish personal relationships
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the idea of small groups may be important. This is not a hidden thing in the end
The concept and the idea are very useful in my opion and if it behaves well in real life practice, then more people would probably join the community and understand certain aspects that come with it.
I like the idea of building groups.. Very interesting to see how it evolved..
Hi All,
This is very useful post.
Thanks,
Very nice idea of building these groups!
Very nice idea of building these groups!