
Radio Show Interview: Collaborative Innovation at Scale
The area of collaborative innovation is a natural extension of the social business movement. It’s the extension of social into purposeful collaboration, a term Alan Lepofsky uses to describe the evolution of the social business market. In the innovation-focused radio show, Women Who Innovate, host LeAnna Carey, innovation expert John Lewis and I talk about […]
Talk-n-Tweet | Collaborative Innovation at Scale
Previously, I’ve described Why Crowdsourcing Works. Crowdsourcing is a case where you get many people who don’t one another collaborating toward a defined outcome.To reiterate the principle points about the value of crowdsourcing: Diverse inputs drive superior solutions Cognitive diversity requires spanning gaps in social networks Simple enough, yet actually a rich field for work and […]

Should Facebook Get Into the Employee Collaboration Space?
An article in Techcrunch yesterday says that Facebook may be working on using their platform for internal collaboration. The article isn’t conclusive in any way and doesn’t speculate as to whether any type of new product is being worked on or if the chatter is about simply using Facebook for collaboration purposes. I remember hearing […]

Collaboration and the Online Dating Syndrome
Anyone that has tried online dating can tell you that the person you see online isn’t always the same person that you see in real life. See, the problem with online dating is that people can make themselves look like anyone they want online. This is the same problem with many organizations today. Organizations today […]

Collaboration Delivers on Value But Where’s the Money?
When organizations deploy collaborative technologies and strategies to connect and engage their people and information they see all sorts of benefits. These include improved access to people and information, reduced travel costs, opportunity identification, issue resolution, employee engagement, improved employee retention, reduction in content duplication, and a host of other things. So, theoretically there should […]

Do or Do Not, There is No Try
The title of this post comes from a quote from Yoda, the famous Star Wars characters. Who would have thought that many years later this quote would be so applicable to organizations seeking to become more collaborative. This quote was actually used by one of our clients during an internal presentation to her executive team […]

The Feature Adoption Framework for Social Collaboration
One of the things that organizations need to consider when rolling out a social collaboration platform is how various features will impact or affect adoption. Most platforms today have dozens of features but should organizations roll them out all at once? That can certainly be one approach. But another approach which I find to be […]

Structuring and Building Enterprise Collaboration Teams
In developing enterprise collaboration teams it is common to find that some employees are more involved than others. David Straus developed a concept called “rings of involvement” that applies to how involved relevant stakeholders are in collaboration. That concept inspired the chart shown below and I talk about it in much greater depth in my book, The Collaborative Organization. […]

Connect to Work
Last week I wrote about one of the key themes that I believe are going to make up the future work, I encourage you to read that post titled: The Future of Work is About Customized Work. There are several of these themes that I’m going to be exploring in the near future and the […]

Enterprise Collaboration Technology Deployment Scenarios
I’m seeing a few trends around how organizations are deploying enterprise collaboration platforms. Typically one of four paths are taken which are: a unified solution, multiple solutions (not connected), an aggregator solution, or multiple solutions which are integrated together. These are explained in more detail in the table below. What is it Pros Cons When […]

The Future of Work is NOT About Replacing Sharepoint and Email
Some still believe that the whole point of investing in enterprise collaboration tools and strategies is simply to replace existing systems that organizations are currently using such as Sharepoint and/or email. Let me be clear that it is about far more than that. At the core; we are talking about the future of work. Technology […]

The Gap Between the Consumer Web and the Enterprise
Much of what we are seeing in the enterprise is being fueled by the consumer web. For example if there would have been no Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin, chances are there would be no Jive, Yammer, Chatter, or any other enterprise collaboration platform. The behaviors we exhibit on social media channels are also making […]

Announcing The Future of Work Survey; Take it and Share it!
Today Chess Media Group is launching a new survey; The Future of Work: Collaboration and Flexible Work Solutions for Today and Tomorrow. The goal of the survey to is to uncover a few things around: the usage of social and collaborative tools within the enterprise the state of flexible work arrangements BYOD policies and approaches […]

Investing in Enterprise Collaboration Can Help You Attract and Retain Top Talent
According to a Forbes article by Jeanne Meister: “The average worker today stays at each of his or her jobs for 4.4 years, according to the most recent available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the expected tenure of the workforce’s youngest employees is about half that. Ninety-one percent of Millennials (born between […]

The Five-Step Maturity Model for Building a Collaborative Organization
In my book, The Collaborative Organization, I featured a maturity model that Chess Media Group created based on our client experience and research. The purpose of the maturity model is to help organizations where they are today, where they should go in the future and the value of doing so, and how to get there. […]