What Is New and Innovative in Collaboration Tools that Your Organization Can Use for Strategic Advantages?
Introduction to Technology Platforms for Communities of Practice Version of March 24, 2004 by George Pór
Collaboration: The New Engine of Value Creation The availability of high-performance collaboration tools—and the extra value they help create—gave rise to a new and decisive domain of competition: your organization's capacity for high-trust collaboration. If you want to kick your company's collaboration competence up a few notches, internally and externally, then it needs to learn how to benefit from today's advanced collaboration tools and practices. For years, some of the largest businesses and NGO's of the world, as well as public service agencies in many countries, have been using new and more collaborative ways of organizing work and developing new capabilities. Those emerging approaches include open source communities, knowledge networks, and communities of practice, just to mention a few. To deliver their promise of significant business results, their practices must be supported by technologies that enable truly triple-E collaboration: effective, efficient, and enjoyable. When knowledge sharing depends on good will, then effectiveness and efficiency—the classic conditions of high performance—cannot be met without that sharing also becoming enjoyable and fun. What are those technologies? This paper gives a compact introduction to the enabling software of triple-E collaboration in communities of practice.
© 2004, George Pór
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Software for Communities of Practice Communities of practice, or "communities" for short, are self-governing groups of people who share a passion for the common domain of what they do and strive to become better at it. They create value for their members and the organization hosting them through: • Developing and spreading new knowledge and capabilities • Fostering innovation • Building and testing trust in working relationships 1 It is not surprising that communities of practice are central to successful knowledge management initiatives.... They are channels for knowledge to cross boundaries created by workflow, functions, geography, and time.2 Examples of communities of practice are found in many organizations and have been called by different names at various times, names such as "learning communities" at Hewlett-Packard Company, "family groups" at Xerox Corporation, "thematic groups" at the World Bank, "peer groups" at British Petroleum, and "knowledge networks" at IBM Global Services, but they remain similar in general intent. Organizations like those support and report on the formation and ongoing maintenance of communities, recognizing the influence they have in helping the organizations to be productive and innovative.3 Colleagues in the same profession who meet twice a month during a lunch break or who share questions and ideas in a monthly conference call are some of the simple ways in which those communities manifest. However, the number of those who can participate in their productive conversations is limited by the constraints of schedule, travel expenses, the scarcity of airtime during conference calls of large groups, etc. Community software helps to overcome these limitations. They key modules of community platforms are sets of tools for: • Knowledge development and sharing • Relationship and trust building
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Source: "Liberating the Innovation Value of Communities of Practice" in the forthcoming textbook on "Knowledge Economics: Emerging Principles, Practices and Policies." http://www.entovation.com/coming-soon.htm 2
Building and Sustaining Communities of Practice - a study by American Productivity and Quality Center, http://www.apqc.org/ 3 Evolving communities of practice: IBM Global Services experience, by P. Gongla, C.R. Rizzuto, in IBM Systems Journal 2001, http://www.findarticles.com/m0ISJ/4_40/issue.jhtml
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• Community facilitation and management • System administration and customization, typically through a web interface
Tools for knowledge development and sharing Personal notebook The personal notebook is a private, online scratchpad in which participants can copy quotes, develop ideas, and gather relevant chunks of content from documents and forums. Personal publishing Weblogs of members are chronologically organized notes from their learning itinerary made available to colleagues for accelerating the crossfertilization of ideas through content syndication and news-feed subscriptions. Team and community blogging These variations of collaborative blogging are designed to make team or community-wide collaboration easier, more engaging, and inspiring. Co-authoring and collaborative content management The popular wiki software allows jointly creating and updating web-based documents by all community members. Discussion forums Message boards and forums are the classic conversation engines and are particularly well suited for issues management and collaboration on specific topics or projects. Forums can also provide a customizable mix of public, private, and semiprivate conversation spaces with clearly defined boundaries between them. Document management A good document management system integrated with the community platform gives members the capability to post, organize, and version-
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control completed files of all sorts, as well as assign action workflows to each. Hypertrails Creating trails of hyperlinks that connect related pieces of content, news, documents, and conversations is a key act of meaning making and knowledge building. Community platforms should make it very easy for each member to do that. Taxonomy and metadata Word and other documents, wiki pages, and forum topics should be supported by a shared classification scheme (taxonomy) of terms used by the community and their agreed meanings. Metadata, or data about data, helps members managing the complexity of the various types of knowledge objects in advanced community platforms. Taxonomy and metadata are essential both to the creation and usage of shared knowledge bases and to deliver personalized content to members. Integration with the users’ home environments When closely integrated with MS Office, the standard business software suite provides members with personal productivity gains. So does Web-drive, a software feature that lets members conveniently move file and folders between their home environment and the collaboration spaces. Help systems Context-sensitive and indexed help pages searchable by keywords are required components of complex, feature-rich collaboration systems. Search and navigation A good search engine supports full-text searches of all content, including blogs, forums, documents, and wiki pages. Clickable site maps are visual navigation tools essential for visual thinkers. Many managers and executives feel more at home with visual displays rather than text-based navigation.
Tools for coordination and relationship and trust building
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Member profiles and directories The personal profiles and member directories support networking among members, allowing them to find people with similar interest, affiliation, or geographic area. Calendaring By using the calendar feature, members can review, add and edit events, milestones, and appointments. Presence indicators The “who is online” presence indicators make visible which community members are on line. Real-time messaging and chat The real-time connections between members via phone calls, instant messaging, text and video chats with their rapid feedback loops are excellent channels for relationship and trust-building and for sorting out thorny issues that would be more cumbersome to do by e-mail or asynchronous conferencing. Project work areas These are workspaces designed to help teams of the community organizing around projects of shared interest and coordinating their collaboration in and among those projects. Tools for eliciting common views and intent The following features of the platform allow the community to know better its shared views and intent. Voting, in its simplest form, is selecting from two or more options. Polling is an activity that contains a question or list of questions to which other members answer. After they enter a response, they will have the opportunity to read the cumulative results. Surveys are another tool for eliciting members’ opinions on issues of portent to the community by having them enter their responses to a set of questions. The survey-building tools should allow users to create surveys and have the system tally the results. Rating can be added—in well-designed community platforms—to almost any content object. It is a primary tool for building reputations by authoring content elements that score high in the collaborative rating.
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Notifications Interest-based notifications Given the members’ interests reflected in their notification settings, the system should send automatic notices when a new event, object, topic, or reply appears that matches them. Author notifications Authors of content in the cybraries, forums, blogs, and wikis can ask that they be notified when someone has opened their object or added a response or comment to theirs. System notifications The system can send summaries of new activities in various areas on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Automated invitations Members should be able to send a templated invitation to colleagues to join any online activity initiated by them.
Tools for community facilitation and management User management This happens through a web-based interface for creating user accounts and allocating access rights in accordance with community-established rules. Conversation management Facilitators create and customize forums and topics by setting the software switches so that the “interior design” of the conversation space matches the community’s needs. The software also should support the easy copying, moving, and hyper-linking of forums, topics, and replies within and across connected communities. Statistical tools These tools allow facilitators to analyze the presence and usage patterns to better understand and support the needs and aspirations of community members. Archiving tools
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With these tools, community facilitators can remove completed topics and projects from the active platform and save them for future reference in the archives section, thus enabling more focused discussions on active topics and projects.
How to choose a platform There is no one community platform that has all of these features. However, the more advanced a platform, the more it provides community members and facilitators with more of the features outlined here. The importance of what is missing from any community environment has to be weighted against the current and near-term needs of your communities. The single most important characteristics of community software is the robustness of its architecture, capable of evolving with the changing needs of the community while maintaining its integrity so that users won’t become overwhelmed and confused by a patchwork of poorly organized tools. The platform we found that embodies most of these features, including the evolutionary requirement, is enable2, which is published by Font Solutions. We have been using their system for close to a year and are pleased with both its performance and potential. Other platforms for communities of practice worth giving attention to include Simplify!, WebCrossing, and TikiWiki. No matter which platform you choose, none of them will help your communities become your organization’s strategic advantage, without the work of the Community Architect, someone who understands the dynamics of community formation, knowledge development, the software tools for supporting both, and who brings them together into the potent combinations. The Community Architect’s work will be the subject of our next paper.
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