There’s a good deal of chatter on the web defending the rights of users to work and post anonymously, either with no identification (anonymity) or through aliases (or pseudonymity). I approve of online anonymity on general principle, and believe that it serves the common good far more than it threatens the balance. The possibility of anonymity in closed, proprietary enterprise collaboration platforms, however, is a different story.
 
For one thing, I find it fairly hard to believe that there can be true anonymity in a private, password-protected enterprise collaboration system. Setting aside the fact that everyone has a distinct style of writing that illuminates their identity to people who are familiar with their work (or can easily compare posts to archived docs), there is always IT department magic that can identify users fairly easily should the need arise. But more than that, choosing to allow anonymity sends a pretty distinct message to your users: “I don’t really care who you are or what you say, as long as the work gets done.” Sure, users might see it differently and glory in the ability to post away and comment and interact under a cloak of obscurity, free from ridicule and peer pressure, but it amounts to the same thing: fomenting discord, disharmony, and dysfunction within an organization.

 
The arguments for anonymity, as I understand them, go something like this:
 
1) Some people feel more comfortable being able to voice opinions and concerns without threat of reprisal or mockery.

2) Working in an anonymous capacity can free users to be more creative than otherwise might be possible.

3) Anonymity allows people to explore other aspects of their personalities and become involved in groups or projects that do not necessarily fall under their traditional bailiwick.

I beg to differ. To rebut each of these in turn…
 
1) If there is an issue an employee feels needs to be addressed that might either make their managers unhappy or offend their peers, an online collaborative community hardly seems like an appropriate venue to air the dirty laundry. If it’s a matter if whistle-blowing there’s the HR department (or the police or other legal aid if it’s a legal matter). The same goes for matters of dissatisfaction with company policies or practices: if it’s something an employee knows will ruffle feathers, then a more personal approach seems appropriate, and in cases where many employees feel the same the company should ideally be strong enough to take constructive criticism and respond diplomatically to it without threatening a person’s career or character.

2) I simply do not believe this one (despite the fact that I found references to this phenomenon in a few articles). I have not yet met the employee who did not want recognition for their own brilliant ideas, and an organization should likewise want to respond to and reward star thinkers for innovative thinking, work, and action.

3) Work is simply not the place to explore one’s alter ego. I am all for personal growth and exploration, but perhaps a different venue might allow for even greater freedom and progress in this arena.

It all goes back to your strategy for your enterprise community, and how you intend your online community to support the organization’s goals. If you feel there are a lot of problems and you want to identify and rectify them through the community forum, but feel like users will only post under the protection of anonymity, then it might make sense for you to provide the option. If your goal is collaboration and teamwork, however, anonymity does not make a great deal of sense as anonymous posts do more to undermine harmony and threaten the other users than it does to foster an environment of honesty and transparency.
 
I am certainly willing to be overruled here, if there is evidence to refute my argument. Has anyone experimented with anonymity in enterprise collaboration? What were the results? If you could, would you revoke it? Does anyone know of any other compelling reasons why an organization should or should not allow or encourage anonymity or pseudonymity
 
Blog Written by Courtney Steen, Diagram Designed by David Lee.

Adopting and implementing a new online enterprise community is never a completely smooth and linear process. Knowing what to expect, however, prepares you to deal with the problems so you can have a plan in place to react quickly.

1) Strategy.—Outline and rely on not only an implementation strategy but a business goal strategy before you even start looking at platform options:

1. how and for what purposes are you going to use the community,
2. who will use the community,
3. what tools do you need to both facilitate the communities functions and ease adoption for your users, and
4. how does using the community align with business needs and further enterprise goals?

2) Choosing a platform. —There are a lot of options out there, the sheer number and plethora of capabilities of which can overwhelm someone who is unfamiliar with the software. Choosing a knowledgeable and responsive partner to help research the possibilities and report back on which platform fits the best will save you time, headaches, and money in the long run.

3) Resistance to change. —The wariness and discomfort most people display when confronted with a new technology someone expects them to use presents a very real and pressing problem for adoption. Low-level employees struggle with the idea that this is just another program they have to learn, something they will need to transfer all of their work to, and they worry that if they don’t “get it” fast enough they’ll look bad. Managers and executives worry that community platforms will give employees too much power or enable them to shirk their work. Addressing and overcoming these anxieties and encouraging adoption despite them is one of the biggest aids to a smooth implementation process.

4) Technology hurdles. —This is not simply a matter of having computers with compatible platforms and the latest versions of software (thought that certainly helps), it’s a matter of encouraging adoption through technology. For example, make it easy to sign in to the community by creating a single sign-on program: users can sign in to their computer stations and that single portal will sign them on to the community, their email and IM clients, and other programs they use constantly as well. This will encourage adoption because it immediately impacts their efficiency with measurable improvement.

These are just the main hurdles that we have come up against in some of the communities we have implemented. What are some of the other hurdles that face enterprise 2.0?

Blog Written by Courtney Steen, Diagram Designed by David Lee.

Enterprise Collaboration Implementation Strategy – UX Diagram

It takes all kinds to make a business run smoothly, so (appropriately enough) users of enterprise community platforms come in a variety of personalities, passions, and manias. From the over-friendly chatty guy who organizes the American Idol office pool to the brilliant but painfully shy girl on the product engineering team, they all have a place in the grand scheme of things, and no enterprise community would be complete without them.

*Creators—These users sign up for services and groups, troll for interesting articles and repost them, blog, maintain a personal website, load video and/or audio clips, and in general add to the vast amount of consumable content online. You know this girl: she’s the one who blogs about her knitting all the time. She posts pictures of her three disgruntled dobermans wearing knit scarves and hats, is a respected and profitable member of Etsy.com (where she can sell her stuff to others), Tweets about all the softest yarn, and has a strong Facebook following of pictures of her “furmiliated” pets.

Critics—Far from being needlessly critical of everything, these users are the uber-commenters. They post comments to articles, edit and update wikis, and relentlessly rate and review different things online (possibly active in Yelp). This one’s not hard to spot, either. He’s that quiet, kind of nerdy, bespectacled fellow who sits in the first desk by the elevator so he can see all the goings-on. You’ve never actually talked to him, but you know he listens a lot, and if you have a presence online, you’ll certainly know exactly what he does and does not like.

Collectors—These users are relatively rare, as they collect, catalogue, and store reams of useful links to websites, forums, images, articles, and videos, etc. In your enterprise network, this woman is setting herself up to be the next Kevin Rose.

Joiners—Joiners are members of all the newest and hottest social communities. They Tweet how their breakfast settled, strive to reach 1000 friends on Facebook, secretly maintain their MySpace account (though they will wildly deny this if asked directly), join and post on forums and communities, and in general revel in the socially rewarding act of becoming a part of different groups. In all likelihood, this is Bert in Accounting, who organizes all the after work happy hours at the bar down the street, dreams of a company softball team, and lobbies for friendly afternoon poker games once a quarter.

Spectators—In other words, these users are lurkers, though not necessarily in the creepy sense. They carefully read articles and posts, often both enjoying and learning from the experience. They watch videos and may listen to some of those streaming radio stations online. This is most likely that mousy girl from high school who friended you on Facebook but never posts a status update, just logs on a few times a week to see what her community is up to. These people are more comfortable knowing what others are up to and consuming content, but are either uncomfortable putting themselves out there for possible criticism, or are just plain too busy to spend the time to make their voices heard.

Inactives—You all know this guy: he dutifully signed up because all his friends did (or, in the case of enterprise collaboration, the boss told him to), then never returned or only returns rarely. He’s the one who still prints out articles he thinks you might need for your research, and has Joan in HR drop them off on your desk. He is at constant risk of having his accounts shut down due to inactivity. He has probably checked out all the latest networking sites, and may even have signed up for a few, but his profile completeness status constantly hovers around the 30% mark.

In general, what kind of user are you? The uber-commenter or the shy spectator? Have you identified other common types of users? Let us know!

*Source for the common user types: Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.

In the last post, I included an infograph that shows one of the strategies we have used to help our clients implement enterprise collaboration tools in their internal spaces. This visual communication document came in really handy during the buy-in and implementation phases because it is easy to locate all the touch points where interaction happens between employees.
A complex tool like enterprise collaboration is hard to explain to others, and it is even harder to explain the benefits of using such a tool. FG SQUARED has created two User Experience (UX) documents: one shows how we utilize enterprise collaboration tools to get work done, and the other illustrates the benefits of using enterprise collaboration tools.
Please leave a reply to download these diagram in PDF format.
Written by: Courtney Steen,and David Lee

User Experience: Enterprise Collaboration Tool

Benefits: Enterprise Collaboration Tool

As I said earlier, enterprise collaboration communities are hardly a matter of “build it and they will come.” Adoption is a process: a mostly pleasantly surprising process, sure, but a sometimes lengthy one, too. In order to minimize the struggle of adopting any new technology or process, here are six best practices for implementation:
1) Get buy-in and early participation of the top-level personnel in the organization in order to increase adoption rates.
2) Secure the support and participation of the IT department in the beginning. Not only will they be most aware of the resource requirements of the community and be able to help strategize the roll-out, but their expertise will probably help drive adoption throughout the company.
3) Start small with the roll-out. Identify a key area within the organization that will benefit from participating in the community, and help them use the collaboration software to find a solution and/or solve their problem. Let this serve as an example to the rest of the organization, and watch the people the community helped become your evangelists!
4) Identify super users, power users, and community evangelists and empower them to being populating the community spaces with content—documents, discussions, polls, wikis, etc—driving adoption among their peers.
5) Hold training sessions. Helping people learn a new approach to collaboration and encouraging them to change behaviors that have served them well enough up until now is a difficult and often discouraging undertaking. Not everyone will immediately understand how to use the community or how it applies to the jobs they need to accomplish. The community tools are often simpler than the ones they use already, but people expect a level of complexity and sometimes over-complicate the process.
6) Be prepared to grant employees a certain level of autonomy, as far as creating documents, blogs, discussions, groups, and spaces go. It can be an unnerving prospect, giving so many people carte blanche permission to create content, but trusting participants will serve the organization in the end. Remember, you still have administrators who can monitor and delete inappropriate or outdated content (like groups that have been idle for months with no activity), and the participants cannot work anonymously, so you can identify where all content originates.

Written by: Courtney Steen, Brad Warren, and David Lee

Written by: Courtney Steen, Brad Warren, and David Lee
1) Increased efficiency. People can accomplish the same tasks in one place that they used to have to open several programs to do, making communities a far more efficient place to get those things done. Activities include writing and collaborating on documents, blogging, brainstorming and problem solving, using Microsoft Office Suite programs (like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.), managing projects, communicating with clients and customers, evangelizing (both internally and externally), training, and a lot more.

2) Direct access to organization knowledge and expertise. Instead of wasting time tracking down information in server archives or even paper files, the sophisticated Web 2.0 technologies (tagging, searching, etc.) enable participants to access the knowledge they need more quickly—in both archives and current posts—and it generally takes fewer people to find it (one person performing a search as opposed to a person approaching five people trying to find out where the information is located and how to access it).

3) Open dialog. Dynamic and open dialog is one of the most efficient ways to communicate, whether it’s disseminating information or opening a discussion and inviting comments. In a place where all the participants gather, answers and responses come pretty quick and are more comprehensive than if an individual did the research alone or did it offline. And because discussions and documents exist in perpetuity in archives, over-communication becomes minimized. Also, these platforms naturally invite solutions to problems that are constructive and creative, and often come from surprising places.

4) The power of the minds of the many outweighs the power of the minds of the few. Enterprise collaboration supports both critical and creative thinking and problem solving through information gathering and collaboration. It’s not just discussion, it’s true collaborative research in the sense that participants both respond to one another to form more progressive solutions, and present their proof in a myriad of ways (cross-referencing information in the archives, presenting videos or music files, etc.).

5) Discussions and versions of docs are archived. While especially important for companies that need to conform to a certain level of transparency for legal reasons, these archives also assist future topic discussions and facilitate knowledge warehousing.

6) Incorporates both discussion and multimedia in the form of URLs and links to articles and websites, as well as video and music, etc. One key difference between offline collaboration of a similar nature is that these online communities enable participants to directly add links, videos, music clips, and other multimedia to aid their discussions and collaboration, making understanding just that much quicker.

7) Flattens an organization’s communication structure. The traditional way of communicating is more of a horizontal roller coaster, with employees navigating the chain of command trying to find the right people to help them solve problems or participate in discussions, often leading to a lot of up-and-down, back-and-forth, and complicated over-communication. Enabling participants to communicate directly and pose questions to all employees (and respond to those discussions) increases and improves communication, freeing up the rest of the chain of command for other activities, and ensuring that the people with the right knowledge respond in an effort to find a solution or advance a topic.

8 )Accountability. No one is anonymous in the communities, so management knows where the discussions and topics originate and can easily monitor conversations. Participants are accountable not only for the amount of work they produce (which is easy to track), but for the discussions they hold and the comments they make.

Written by: Courtney Steen, Brad Warren, and David Lee

In these days of nascent communication and collaboration technology, businesses find themselves confronted with a plethora of choices, one of which is social enterprise software. Well, that’s certainly a smart and savvy sounding term, but just what is enterprise collaboration, and how does the software support enterprise goals? The most prevalent incarnation of this technology is a community, but calling them simply “communities” carries a whole host of positive and negative associations that may or may not be accurate and doesn’t really tell the whole story. So here’s a list—high level and by no means comprehensive—of what this kind of platform collaboration is for and the purposes it serves:

Top 5 Definitions

1) Online communities exist to support enterprise document management (wikis and posting documents), a sense of community, storing and updating documents, helping manage and track projects, sharing knowledge, hosting open-minded discussions (that exist, for reference, in perpetuity), facilitating both external corporate communication (with customers, clients, and audiences) and/or internal corporate communication (to employees and stakeholders), and much more.

2) Enterprise collaboration offers a new, one-stop place where you can get all the things done that you do now.

3) These communities act as data, knowledge, document, and discussion archives, cross-referenced, tagged, and easily searchable.

4) Community platforms can be both internal and/or external, and can be manipulated to serve both employees and clients/customers for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways.

5) Communities can act as an information knowledge management tool, helping organize documents and wikis, and certainly supports both collaboration and social interaction at both entry and management levels, and beyond.

With any emerging technology come a number of misconceptions, too:

Top 5 Misconceptions

1) Enterprise collaboration does not empower employees to endlessly chat and goof off. (Unless you want them to goof off for whatever reason.)

2) Work does not take more time, and the software is not “just another tool to learn and have to spend time on.” This tool can replace many others, meaning it takes less time to accomplish the same tasks.

3) Enterprise collaboration cannot solve all problems and replace all other programs. Communities serve a variety of functions, but don’t overestimate their capabilities. Take the time to ask questions and get an understanding of what they really can and cannot do for you.

4) “Build it and they will come.” These communities do not become popular and 100% adopted overnight. In reality adoption is a slow, incremental process that requires top-down encouragement to get people to engage.

5) Communities do not replace Client Relationship Management (CRM) software. It can support CRM software and in many ways can enhance it, but cannot completely fill in for all the functions of CRM software.