Last Week In Collaborative Thinking

Blogger: Mike Gotta

The news this week will be dominated by what comes out of Lotusphere (at least Mon-Wed). I posted some thoughts on why this year's event is so critical to IBM's success in the collaboration market on my Collaborative Thinking blog. Another popular topic last week was the slow uptake of Enterprise RSS (which resulted in two posts which summarize what I am seeing as I discuss feed readers and feed syndication with clients). There was a helpful comment on one of my posts that discussed the history of collaboration. The article reference in the comment was interesting so I called it out in a post which again cited some early work of Digital Equipment Corporation. Finally, the NY Times had a post on workplace anxiety that was pretty interesting. It raised a question in my mind: will worker anxiety influence how they participate and contribute - and how that anxiety change our approach with E2.0 tools.

Below, I've provided a quick summary of the posts with links to the full articles:

Why Lotusphere 2009 Is Important

This year's Lotusphere could very well be a make-or-break moment for the Lotus brand and solution portfolio. I know that's pretty dramatic - but if you look at this through the lens of history and into the crystal ball of the future, I think it's a pretty accurate statement. I don't want this post to be a timeline and reflection on what's gone wrong over the past several years with Lotus but I do want to point out the two major themes that have negatively defined IBM's "thought leadership" and competitive positioning vs. Microsoft...

More On Digital's Knowledge Sharing Efforts

John commented on my post, Why History Is Relevant To The Future Of Collaboration, which itself was a call-out reference from Patti Anklam that I caught on Twitter re: The Camelot of collaboration: The case of VAX Notes - Inside Knowledge. More on "Understanding collaborative learning in networked organizations" in the article below - please follow the citation link.

Workplace Anxiety - Good Or Bad Omen For Social Tools

Interesting article from NYTimes.com (excerpts below). Such organizational dynamics will influence how people participate and contribute with social tools (e.g., "Enterprise 2.0"). Some workers may withdraw under the assumption that hoarding their expertise might help keep them onboard. Others aggressively observe but not contribute under the assumption that they can harvest information to build-up their own personal knowledgebase. There may even be situations where workers actually interact more intensely under the assumption that open participation and contributions might help their visibility and reputation in the organization and therefore increase the likelihood that they are retained. The narrative leadership teams establish within the workplace can have a subtle influence on how people react.

Enterprise RSS - RRW Readers Speak Out

A lot of great comments over at the main article: R.I.P Enterprise RSS. I thought a few deserved additional feedback... I strongly agree that those thinking about application design, information architecture, search, collaboration, portals, and so on need to think about feed syndication as another communication channel and user experience around feeds as the build and deploy systems. You cannot assume that people will interact with content only on the web site or within the application container.

Ten Reasons Why "Enterprise RSS" Has Failed To Become Mainstream

The article below is interesting in that it does call out a dark truth - enterprise adoption of feed syndication tools has been lacking. However, the article disappoints because it gives too much credit to feed readers as the reason. I wish it was that easy. There are a host of reasons why Enterprise RSS has not taken off yet (vs. died).