But beyond that, two very valuable bi-products of data visualization as they relate communities and communication, is the ability to illustrate the “missing data” and contextualize the information.

In 1901, early visualization of international communication had begun.  While these initial visualizations are certainly primitive, ultimately they prove valuable in illustrating bottlenecks in communications, key stakeholders in the networks and opportunities to improve and expand international communication (ie: missing data points).

Some 100 or so years later, Facebook recently provided a visualization of their network connections, as it relates to their growing user base of 500 million individuals.  As the map illustrates, international communication has improved dramatically, and in a very correlative way, so has technological innovation.

As the tools that enable one to one, as well as one to many communication evolve and break down “knowledge silos” it’s no wonder that the world wide adoption of these services have progressed so rapidly.  Consumers are hungry for knowledge, and eager to leverage the communication channels which allow them to tap into these knowledge reserves.

As these technologies have progressed,  they have fundamentally changed how people discover and disseminate knowledge; two components which are foundational to innovation and resourcefulness, regardless of industry or vertical.

But what is really to be drawn from this phenomenon isn’t the ability of “knowledge brokers” to communicate with one another, but in their new found ability to “visualize” where their resources lie and what connections they must tap into to access the information in need.

Internal Communications:

The inherent nimbleness of the consumer allows them to more quickly break down knowledge silos, reinvent their communication mediums, and create industries of innovation at amazing speeds.  The speed and magnitude of these innovations have left many businesses asking themselves “how can we do this too?”

But in order to answer this question, businesses must first ask themselves and understand “What tools, resources and knowledge do we currently have available to us?”

The graphic above illustrates a Social Network Analysis (SNA) of a company with teams working in five international locations.  In order for the teams to distribute information across the organization and promote innovation, they must first utilize this visualization of their organization to ask themselves a series of questions:

1 – How is information currently shared across networks?

2 – Who are the “knowledge brokers” in these networks?

3 – Where (and why) do “information bottlenecks” exist?

4 – What expertise exists in each isolated network?

5 – What tools can we implement to promote communication and knowledge sharing across networks?

6 – What does the ideal SNA look like for our organization, in order to fulfill our needs in innovation, collaboration, etc.?

As with many challenges posed to businesses, the first step is gaining a clear understanding of where one is starting from.  A visual analysis of an organization’s communication map allows them to tap into the “dark matter” necessary to leverage their employees’ knowledge, company resources and collaboration tools to their greatest potential.

We’ve always known our friends at Denver’s Box Studios (http://bit.ly/dHdy0V ) did phenomenal work, and one of their latest projects at the offices of the wildly successful group-buying service GroupOn, is no exception.

Enjoy a few photos of their work at the GroupOn offices here: http://bit.ly/fsAdHZ

For more on GroupOn (collaboration at its best!) check out their recent profile in Forbes: http://bit.ly/ggAHXj

Below are some of our key takeaways from the interview:

- The importance of moving collaboration from a “Portal” strategy to a “Social” strategy.
“In the consumer world, you might have used My Yahoo, and it’s a great destination, but once you find what you want, you leave. With a community, people come and engage with each other. That’s the kind of engagement we want with our customers.”

- Salesforce vs. Jive vs. Sharepoint – Who has it Right?
The Jive folks are pretty committed to working with other technologies, like SharePoint and Salesforce. I think they realize they need to have a strategy to play nice with everyone else.

- Creating a Culture of Collaboration in Organizations.
“When you put something out on the Web, there are no instructions on how to use external Web sites. You just kind of get there and you figure it out. People just opt in. When you do this internally, we can bring in the technology and make it easier to use. It’s only valuable internally if you get the vast majority of people participating. How are we going to create that mindshare?

The thing you have to realize is that you don’t just enable this one time and walk away. It’s a program. You have to continuously go out and monitor usage.”

- On the future on Email.
“I don’t think it’s going to die… (but)… for many kids nowadays, in their world email is a secondary or tertiary form of communication.”

Check out the entire interview here.

Back to Main Page

You may not be ready to engage in these channels but you certainly want to know what’s being said about your company, your competitors or topics that matter to both. Orbital RPM’s Media Monitoring service allows you to find the signals you care about through all of the noise out there.

This is helpful when engaging in Crowdsourcing, Open Innovation, Customer Communities and any other type of Market Collaboration.

For most, resumes are simply a high-level snapshot of generally recognized terms, projects, education, certifications, etc. They’re effective for generating interview questions but do not reveal the nuanced depth of someone’s true experience; especially if their roles are heavy in knowledge-based work as most are.

Enter the challenge with the growing interest in ‘Expertise Location.’  In many discussions I’ve had people feel that by just uploading resumes/work history into a collaboration platfrom this will enable others in the organization to find the experts associated with any given topic.  Not so fast.

The problem is that a resume uploaded today is likely to be out-of-date within weeks or months.  People’s work in organizations is often quite fluid between different projects, functions and departments and not only is that nearly impossible to capture in text, almost no one is going to go back and update their uploaded resume [until their looking to submit it elsewhere].

This is where the advancements in collaboration platforms comes in handy.  Most of the platforms on the market [i.e. Jive, Socialtext, Telligent] will track the different areas in which someone is partcipating and allow others to find them based on that activity.

So when an analyst hired for their prior roles in finance is quickly sent out to your understaffed office in a high growth area they’ll be learning new skills very quickly.  These skills likely won’t make it onto their resume on your system – but they will reveal themselves through the activity generated in a collaboration platform while getting up to speed on these new competencies.

If  your collaboration system and the corresponding processes are set-up correctly you now have an expert in some unique areas that someone in the future can find and leverage.  If not, what are the chances that someone else in the same situation struggles with similar questions, challenges and roadblocks on their road to expertise?  And what is the impact to individuals and the organization when this happens?

• Social Project Management
• Knowledge Communities
• Merger & Acquisition Optimization
• New-hire Integration
• Workspace Design

Collaborating with your ecosystem of workforce, partners and suppliers reduces operational costs, retains critical knowledge, improves job satisfaction and surfaces ideas for innovation. Organization’s perform better when people find what they need.

In 1988 tunnel boring machines aimed at one another began their slow attack from France and the United Kingdom respectively.  The ultimate death match resulted in the Chunnel – a consistent, fixed mode of mass people/cargo transportation across the English Channel.

A similar thing is happening with the inevitable convergence between the fields of Enterprise 2.0 [communities of practice, collaboration networks, knowledge management] and Social Marketing [customer communities, influencer networks, social media, Social CRM].  With the goal being a consistent link between workforce, partners and customers and with the infrastructure to provide a continuous ebb and flow of knowledge, ideas, reputation and all things intangible.  Kinda like the Chunnel.

The success of the Chunnel, as with merging Enterprise 2.0 and Social Marketing initiatives, depends on clear objectives, planning, tools, people and sheer determination.  There’s a big difference too, though.  The Chunnel diggers started at the same time on each side.  I recommend starting your internal/Enterpise 2.0/collaboration initiative before engaging customers or influencers in your customer community/social media initiative.  Don’t meet in the middle.  Why?

Ideally you want some experience with internal collaboration before customers are engaged.  Or ‘Get your house in order before you invite over company.’  Think of your workforce as your immediate family, and your suppliers, partners and vendors as your neighbors.  They can see your house a little messy – especially if it’s due to a snazzy renovation.  Your customers are more like your dates – your best foot is always forward.

It’s for this reason that a strategy where internal collaboration is enabled first is best.  Work out the kinks of collaboration with your internal workforce, suppliers/partners, etc. first so that you’re prepared to respond to customers ridiculously faster than with a silo’d organization.

Evolution of Enterprise 2.0 and Social Marketing

The worlds of Enterprise 2.0 and Social Marketing are the result of a similar evolution[in my mind].  Enterprise 2.0 represents the needed transition in learning and knowledge management from formal [classrooms and databases] to informal [communities and Web 2.0] while Social Marketing is the same evolution in marketing from traditional [print and banner ads] to social [customer and influencer communities].

They have a different audience but the same objective – integrating anyone you count on for success into your strategy for better products, services, efficiency or enhancements to your business model – aka innovation.  Internal and external communities are the incubators of ideas for improvement.  Bring them together successfully and you’ll have the most valuable resource needed for the new economy – knowledge.

Next Steps for Enterprise 2.0 and Social Marketing

As the respective fields are evolving it’s in everyone’s best interest to…wait for it…collaborate.  Shocking, eh?  And this is where those nasty changes in process come into play.  Just b/c it sounds like a great idea for teams form Marketing, Knowledge Management, Innovation, IT, HR, etc. to work together for the sometimes utopian goal of a freeflowing exchange of information through a company’s value network it doesn’t mean it’s easy.  Inconvenient things like politics, personalities, power and culture are all front and center.

This is where we find it helpful to use a tool to visualize and measure process as it occurs in today’s dynamic times. A value network analysis shows stakeholders their current process flows [intangibles included] and let’s them determine how best to rearrange them for mutual benefit.

However it’s done, though, these areas need to be working together – the tunnels within your organization and to those that you count on for success need to be dug and the infrastructure needs to be in place so that knowledge, ideas, reputation and all of the other intangibles you rely on can flow as they need.

For many of the organizations that I speak/work with regarding knowledge networks/communities of practice they have [or are planning on implementing] a collaboration software package with many slick bells and whistles but without a clear path and strategy for getting up and running – this often results in an empty knowledge landscape with little showing except for some bells and whistles strewn about.

Even in the CIO world it’s popular to say that collaboration and innovation isn’t about the software but what do you do in addition to buying software? 

The Iceberg in IT

The delimna I frequently witness is what I call the ‘Iceberg in IT’ conundrum.  Someone decided that people needed to collaborate more and told IT to implement a package that enables collaboration.  While a good software package is certainly a required step, I prefer to put it near last instead of first. 

Using the admittedly cliche and ubiquitous iceberg metaphor above, social software is simply the visible thing that enables collaboration to happen.  When IT is told to purchase it when there is no strategy to generate adoption, it will feel cold and barren [sorry - couldn't help it].  In order to truly affect how this can help people do their jobs there is a large amount of work that needs to done behind the scenes…hence the 7Cs of success:

• Capturing:  the notion of collaboration is foreign in many organizations so people often need to be shown what potential is there if they were to collaborate.  We always visit different geographic locations and capture [via video, audio, memory stick, etc.] what people are working on so that we can determine common topics and have some seed material to begin populating the software system.
• Connecting:  even software that’s designed to connect people will do little in that regard if left on its own.  People [especially when at the early phases] need some help connecting with one another – simple things like setting up bridge calls and facilitating conversations serve to build trust and awareness and provide nuggets of content that can be housed in the platform.
• Combining: in a dispersed organization you’re bound to find bits and pieces of similar work living in a great many places.  Helping the users combine that information using the wiki feature of a platform, for example, will show users the efficiency in working together while training them on what in the world a ‘wiki’ is.
• Contextualizing: the most effective collaboration initiatives will integrate members from an organization’s suppliers and customers and related academic institutions.  Translating that into compelling content that will make sense to your users will be critical in getting them to absorb and leverage it.
• Confirming:  similar to above, if you’re getting knowledge from various sources, care must be taken to ensure that what’s being provided is accurate information so that it can be acted upon.
• Circulating:  what good is the best information if no one knows about it?  The role of a community/network coordinator is essential in circulating news about what’s new, recent questions, etc.
• Communicating: having someone dedicated to getting the word out about the success stories in your knowledge network will go a long way in generating interest, excitement and ,of course, additional funds that will be necessary to continue operations.

Having an effective Web 2.0 collaboration platform at the center of this activity certainly will make it much easier to coordinate but the software alone [today's versions anyhow] will never replace the behind-the-scenes efforts required to start and sustain collaboration and innovation.

At Dell Inc., a corporation that has scooped up many awards for its commitment to diversity, leaders understand the importance of fostering an affirming diversity climate. Thurmond Woodward, Dell’s VP of global diversity said, “We don’t want to focus only on representation, because representation without the right culture leads to a revolving door, and that is not what we were looking to do.”

Within the last fifteen years or so, the workplace has become increasingly diverse along dimensions such as race, gender, age, and nationality. Most business leaders recognize that, by introducing greater diversity into their organizations, they have the potential to gain a strong competitive advantage. At the same time, though, they recognize that this demographic shift is accompanied by pretty big challenges. In fact, organizational diversity doesn’t always work—merging people with different backgrounds and worldviews has the potential for both positive and negative outcomes. For example, diverse organizations have been associated with more effective problem-solving abilities and greater innovation, but also intergroup friction, higher turnover rates, and lower productivity.

What makes diversity work

In order to get the benefits of diversity and minimize its potential negative consequences, it’s not enough to simply implement a couple of diversity-related training programs. Becoming a truly successful multicultural organization requires starting at a deeper level. It requires cultivating a climate where people genuinely value diversity, rather than see it as a moral imperative or as a means of accessing wider markets.
After a yearlong assessment of their diversity climate, Dell put forward a variety of initiatives that would contribute to what they call a “cultural evolution.” These initiatives included sponsoring networking groups for different minority groups, career management programs, cross-cultural training for leaders and employees alike, and diversity focused recruiting. Their efforts were well worth the rewards –now, over half of their employees are minorities and they report higher levels of inclusion and identity freedom. Woodward states that, in terms of the bottom line, their climate has improved customer service experiences and powered their globalization effort.
Dell’s example highlights the fact that climate change is a difficult and long process and that, in order for it to be successful, business-leaders need a multipronged approach to diversity. Taylor Cox, a widely known author in organizational psychology and the founding father of the theoretical model of the multicultural organization, offers some suggestions towards this end. He argues that in order to make this transition into an organization that is truly multicultural and values diversity, efforts must be made in the following areas:

1. Leadership

When leaders become advocates for the importance of diversity, when they demonstrate how diversity is related to broader strategic objectives, and when they model the behaviors they wish to see in the organization, they can have profound effects on the diversity climate. This might mean that the CEO presents the results of a company-wide survey related to diversity issues, makes a video to be delivered to each unit in which he outlines his vision for diversity management, and kicks off and closes diversity seminars. Taylor boldly insists that strong leadership is the single most important element in managing diversity –this type of effort is “doomed to failure” if diversity officers and human resources staff are the only ones taking charge of it.

2. Continuous research and measurement of diversity-related matters

The creation of a diversity climate needs to be data driven. That is, organizations need to be able to diagnose the climate for diversity, measure progress, and tweak diversity initiatives accordingly. In my research, I’ve found evidence that, compared to white employees, racial minorities may have a more negative perception of the organizational climate for diversity. If this is the case in your organization, you may seek out the opinions of minority employees through surveys or focus groups, determine the reason for this perceptual gap, implement a solution, and importantly, continually collect data to monitor the situation.

3. Education

Cultivating an affirming diversity climate also requires an ongoing commitment to education on diversity. Note that this is different from a “one-shot” diversity-training program. These training programs can be used to develop specific communication and leadership skills as well as to help employees understand their responsibilities in the cultural change process. The important element here is that these programs are continually offered and available for employees.

4. Follow-Up

This component is linked to the research and measurement described earlier. It emphasizes that some form of accountability needs to be built into this cultural evolution. By holding quarterly meetings to assess the progress of diversity-related goals, providing incentives to managers and employees for these goals, and managing the sharing of knowledge about diversity efforts, accountability can be strengthened.

So these are the areas where attention should be focused, particularly as our economy is in a tailspin. Studies show that in times of economic instability, individuals go into a self-protective mode, isolating themselves and their socio-cultural group, and this may lead to an increase in workplace discrimination. During this recession, it is perhaps most important to be attentive to and nurture your company’s diversity climate to gain that competitive edge.