You would think that we have enough evidence by now to support the thinking that collaboration methodologies and tools are needed in the workplace, and that they improve efficiency and efficacy. But apparently, no, we don’t. Another recent study, this one from Cambridge’s Judge Business School and Nokia, says that using technology to collaborate improves worker morale.

The researchers asked 400 business leaders in both the United States and United Kingdom how they used mobile technology to communicate and collaborate. In their interviews, they found that 86 percent of the respondents said collaborations help "spark new ideas." Importantly, 75 percent of the interviewees said that when they’re looking for the best person to do the work needed, they will not be bound by geographical constraints in choosing that person. Additionally, 74 percent said that if they couldn’t seek help outside their immediate team, they would not be able to get their work done.

When they drilled down to the question of morale, the researchers found that 80 percent of their respondents said that "having the mobile applications and devices they need has had a positive impact on their morale." A little over three-quarters of those surveyed said that these items improved their company’s morale.   

Of course, if a non-Nokia (or any other technology company) sponsored study came forward with the same information, most people would view it a bit less suspiciously. However, the point is basic: If you give your staff the right tools to do the best work they can, they will be happier employees.

In this case, it’s mobile technology that enables collaboration. If you ask most workers who don’t currently use a laptop or have the ability to work remotely if they would prefer the option, you will hear a resounding "Yes!" Additionally, if you ask those same workers if they would like the ability to work with subject matter experts outside their team to get their work done, I’d bet you’d hear the same "Yes!"

Speaking of working outside the team, a group of researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) have rolled out a new project funded by the National Science Foundation designed to connect women researchers at the school. Currently, they find that female scientists and engineers are challenged with the problem of isolation. The NJIT project will build cross-disciplinary communities where female faculty can collaborate online and communicate in larger numbers. Then, after the communities are live for a while, the project heads will formally connect the communities using traditional face-to-face networking.

Echoing the sentiments in Nokia’s study, the NJIT folks will be using location-sensitive mobile communication systems to increase collaboration among non-collocated researchers. That portion is being developed as part of the school’s "Smart Campus" project, "a location-aware community cybersystem." NSF is funding that in a separate grant.

Probably the most interesting part of all this is what the project researchers are going to do with the data from the study. NJIT plans to use it to "create a dynamic computer map showing changes in social network complexity over time."

I’m going to keep an eye out for the results of that study.

I got a laugh out of fellow-blogger Jonathan Spira’s recent post on the difficulty he had conveying the meaning of “knowledge worker” to a reporter at a national business publication. I assume “Jane” is young indeed if she doesn’t know what a knowledge worker is, and naïve if she thinks her readers don’t, either. According to Wikipedia, the term’s been around for almost 50 years, coined by none other than Peter Drucker (presumably someone the business reporter has heard of).

But I take Spira’s larger point to heart: Knowledge workers are most decidedly not simply “office workers” (or limited to “executives”); rather, they are employees who use information to do their jobs, differentiate their company’s brand, and contribute to the bottom line.

What’s cool is that as collaborative technologies evolve, they are enabling more employees to be recast as knowledge workers. So, for instance, while a sales clerk would not traditionally be defined as a knowledge worker, she can be if she’s empowered with information that helps her move more merchandise and keep customers coming back. One way to do that is to give her instant access to product and customer data; presence-powered contact with managers and co-workers at other stores or within the warehouse; and training to learn better up-selling and cross-selling techniques. All those can be delivered via presence-driven collaborative applications, ideally with a mobile component and integrated into back-end enterprise applications.

Or take the example of a stock clerk who normally would do nothing more than, well, stock shelves. Armed with the right collaboration tools, he can now act as a knowledge worker in several capacities—he can help the store’s supply chain systems stay up to date on what’s in stock and what’s not; and he can help customers find the products they’re looking for, even if they’re not on the shelves or “in the back.”

What’s more, collaborative technologies are helping knowledge workers move into other areas of the enterprise. Now, customer service reps can tap experts within product development, R&D and management teams to get answers to their customers in real time, without those experts having to leave their desks (or cars, or store floors).

There are, of course, a few key enablers of this trend. The biggest may be mobility—companies looking to transform more of their employees into knowledge workers will probably have to do so using mobile devices to get them the information they need when and where they need it. Management and organizational structures also need to change, so that employees who might not in the past have been seen as “experts” are empowered to use, create and deliver information.

Meanwhile, anyone who doesn’t understand the term knowledge worker could check out that Wikipedia link—the most notable thing about it, in my mind, is that almost everything written on the subject points to the need for collaboration, communication and forward-thinking knowledge management techniques. It’s all good stuff for the unified communications industry, if you ask me.

Last week Steve Wylie asked for feedback after briefly outlining why the Collaborative Technologies Conference is changing its name to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. To me, the change makes sense and recognizes the influence Web 2.0 technologies are making on enterprise collaboration. However, don’t think that Enterprise 2.0 is simply the repurposing of blogs, wikis, bookmarking, etc. for corporate use. In my opinion, the Enterprise 2.0 name represents the refinement of CTC’s original mission, of which Web 2.0 technologies play a significant role.

It has been less than a year since Andrew McAfee’s use of the phrase "Enterprise 2.0" in an MIT Sloan Management Review article accelerated an already growing interest in the use of Web 2.0 technologies within corporations. Now we need to focus that energy and take it beyond simply the application of consumer technologies on intranets. Enterprise 2.0 is much more because corporations have distinct challenges from public Internet users.

McAfee coined the acronym SLATES (Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions, and Signals) to describe the technology components of Enterprise 2.0. This is a good start but the opportunities go well beyond these. I envision Enterprise 2.0 being grouped into three different areas.

First, there are Enterprise 2.0 management strategies. McAfee touched upon these in his SMR article where he talked about creating a receptive culture and driving management support. But, again, these are only a start. The difficult non-technical issues of technology adoption, especially those dealing with culture, have been critical topics addressed by CTC in past conferences and continue to represent the biggest opportunity for future conferences (especially for one that uses the 2.0 moniker). I think Mike Gotta said it best when he concluded in a recent Collaboration Loop blog post:

Elevating people, groups (teams, communities) and networks to the same level of importance as data, information and process is long overdue.

Next, there are (what I call) the user-centric building blocks for Enterprise 2.0. Some of these are elements of SLATES and include things like simple authoring systems (including blogs, wikis, and team workspaces), tagging, notification management, search (including persistent search), conferencing, presence, lists, and calendars.  

Some of these are innovations from Web 2.0 technologies but many are not. Lists and list management, in particular, are critical building blocks for corporate collaboration and a number of innovative companies (such as JotSpot/Google and Dabble DB) are starting to recognize this. These types of building blocks, supported by Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure components that provide access to enterprise application data, will allow corporate workers to create innovative enterprise mashups.

There are infrastructure components of Enterprise 2.0 as well. These tend to be more enterprise-y in nature and include things like platforms for collaboration and community, lightweight data aggregation (including connectivity to enterprise applications), integration with identity, security, and records management, and also interoperability. However, don’t think this is the same old boring enterprise infrastructure. Among other opportunities, the success of RSS and simple APIs has highlighted the value of lightweight data aggregation and connectivity.

Finally, as someone who has been involved in CTC from the start, and who has been involved in collaborative technologies for many years, I think it is easy to focus on finding the perfect name for a conference like CTC. But, the toughest challenge may be in getting the attention these solutions deserve. This isn’t just about deploying the latest conferencing, presence, social, or team workspace solution. This is about the future face of enterprise computing.

No doubt you’ve heard of Skype by now, the free phone/IM/video service.  It’s likely if you are reading this you’re probably sufficiently interested in communications and collaboration applications that you’ve already taken the time to download Skype and try it out, perhaps with our without your organization’s permission.  But is Skype destined to become an enterprise collaboration platform, or will it remain an application that continues to be officially shunned by a large portion of the enterprise market?

Skype, the little phone service that could, has taken the Internet by storm over the last several years, with over 300 million downloads, and somewhere around 6-7 million active users at any given time.  But what’s most interesting about Skype is its potential as an enterprise collaboration platform, potentially offering a feature set that matches that which is available from dedicated enterprise platforms, but at a far lower cost.

Our interviews for our upcoming benchmark “Building a Successful Virtual Workplace” have shown some interesting trends with regard to Skype usage in the enterprise.  Very few of the organizations we’ve spoken to officially allow the use of Skype, mostly due to concern over lack of management and security controls.  But a small number of enterprises have embraced Skype, or are at the very least considering the use of Skype for communications and collaboration.  A far larger percentage of organizations are aware of Skype usage by their employees, and are struggling to get their arms around its impact.

As a collaboration platform Skype offers for many their first taste of unified communications, with a single buddy-list-based application supporting voice, instant messaging, video conferencing and presence.  Third party applications such as WebDialog’s “Unyte” and Convenos enable Skype users to integrate web conferencing capabilities such as document sharing, polling, and shared whiteboards.  (See this site for additional Skype-enabled collaboration tools).

Still, enterprises by and large reject Skype as a supportable communications and collaboration platform.  Typical reasons include the aforementioned security and management concerns, but also the inability of the enterprise to guarantee Skype quality.  Still, the idea of “free” internal communications, and low cost collaboration capabilities without the need to procure and support dedicated application platforms is compelling.  Should Skype sufficiently address enterprise management and security concerns in future releases of its products, it may be able to turn widespread enterprise interest into widespread adoption.

A reporter/associate editor (we’ll call her Jane) from a major business publication called to discuss what she was writing about our research on knowledge work and knowledge workers (including our current survey The New Workplace) in an upcoming piece.  But she hesitates to use the term "knowledge worker" worrying that readers won’t know exactly what that means.

My first thought harkens to something President Josiah Bartlett once said when aides told him that his audience would not understand a word he was about to use in a campaign speech.  "Let them look it up in a dictionary" he told the aides.

Jane e-mailed me, asking "what is a knowledge worker exactly?"
I replied with a two-part definition from my book, Managing the Knowledge Workforce .  "A knowledge worker is a participant in the knowledge economy.  The knowledge economy is an economic environment where information and its manipulation are the commodity and the activity (in contrast to the industrial economy, where the worker produced a tangible object with raw production materials and physical goods)."

Jane then asked: "Instead of knowledge worker can we say ‘office professional’?  I think this will be easier for our readers."

My reply:  "That opens up a can of worms.  People see "office workers" (I’ve not run across the term "office professional" before) as administrative in-office workers.  Knowledge workers (sometimes called information workers, just to make it even more confusing) are a distinct breed, having a depth and breadth beyond office workers and very distinct from factory and field workers.  They could be in a laboratory, at a construction site, at a museum.

I knew that my reply didn’t exactly help but it does shed light on just what we are up against.  I understand Jane’s desire to make this "easier" but isn’t an easy subject.  Perhaps you could explain knowledge workers parenthetically, I wrote to Jane.

She replied:  "Would executives work?"

Jane is not alone in struggling to define the knowledge worker.  Many managers and even knowledge workers themselves are unaware of the term and that they are indeed knowledge workers.  This is, in fact, the raison d’etre behind the New Workplace survey.  If you haven’t yet taken the survey, please do click here and take it. 

In the movie "The Graduate", one of the more famous scenes occurs when Dustin Hoffman is given some very proactive and free advice regarding "plastics". Today, that advice might go like this:

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Enterprise 2.0.

Technically this might count as two words, but I saw this quote recently while reading an article on innovation. It reminded me of the situation we face today. There are many people proactively offering advice to business and IT strategists concerning market, organizational and technology trends under the banner of "[insert term here] 2.0".

Whether it’s Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Office 2.0, or something else, those with advice to offer parallel that scene in "The Graduate". It’s an answer to a question but we’re really not sure what the question is and we’re pretty sure that no matter what question poor Benjamin might have come up with, the answer was going to be the same - "plastics".

Today, that answer is a little more varied but seemingly always ends the “2.0” meme. The “plastics” secret word has been replaced by "blogs", "wikis", "social networks", "RSS", "tagging", "social bookmarks", "Ajax" and so on. In many cases, those terms are tossed around by vendors who also just happen to sell either technology or professional services in that very same space. Shocking.

So off we go, chasing the "[insert term here] 2.0" technology hammer to whatever poor nail happens to get in the way.  What comes to mind then is another famous quote. This time, however, I’ll go back a little further in history and point to Homer: "To the Sirens first shalt thou come, who bewitch all men, whosoever shall come to them."

It’s important to point out that my disagreement with what has become almost conventional wisdom surrounding all-things-suffixed-by-2.0 is entirely directed at the irrational exuberance some experts have in recommending technology as a silver-bullet and panacea to problems faced by large enterprises simply because it falls under the “2.0” umbrella. More often than not, I find serious gaps in what fails to be mentioned. Namely, issues related to security, identity, compliance, records management, integration, interoperability and other concerns.

So my plea is as follows: If you are going to point out the benefits, please take the time to point out the risks. If you are not aware of the risks, then at least put a disclaimer on your presentation or posting to point out that such issues need to be addressed. That’s a key message I think needs to come across more often. A balanced argument aids credibility.

But it’s not all negative. On the positive side of all-things-labeled-2.0, I actually am quite excited that the industry is finally prioritizing the importance of understanding the behaviors, motivations and activities of people, groups and networks of all kinds and how those interactivities and inter-relationships influence "work" (productivity, performance, innovation and so on). Our industry in general has over-prioritized formal structures (e.g., process, taxonomies), intricate infrastructure (e.g., web services) and centrally controlled technologies (e.g., enterprise portals) and under-delivered solutions that enable people to serve their own needs in a simple, informal and collective fashion. It’s not an either / or situation. We need to do a better job at connecting the emergent technologies that favor “the edge” with the institutional scaffolding that runs “the core” of large enterprises.

I am constantly looking for examples of studies where practioners have taken the time to examine organizational dynamics beyond the 2.0 technology tip-of-the-iceberg. Some of the work I’ve read does a solid job at observation, analysis and recommendations. Sometimes, the solutions are driven by changes at the organizational level and include no technology at all.

Shocking. No blog, no wiki. How can that be?  

I honestly believe that the more transformational 2.0 solutions will be driven by a focus on the organizational dynamics that address issues related to leadership, followership, decision rights, human capital management, community-building, converging work/lifestyles and so on - not technology per se.

And when technology does become an enabler to the solution (e.g., blog, wiki or mashup of some sort), due diligence regarding security, identity, compliance, records management, and alignment with existing infrastructure investments will still be required (and viewed as a best practice).

While it is important to enable users themselves to construct their own communication, information sharing and collaborative environments, they need to do so within policies and structures that do not put the enterprise at risk. And that’s a key message to also get across. Technology needs a context; the history of IT is littered with mistakes when we fail to learn from history (perhaps we need to think of this as "Repeating History 2.0" in order for it to catch on).

What I am most happy about though is how Enterprise 2.0 (and its extended family) is helping the discipline of socially-oriented methods of research and analysis (e.g., ethnography, anthropology) to become more commonly accepted and recognized by traditional IT groups. Over time, IT groups will need to be as competent in these areas as they are in disciplines related to data, information and process. And that’s another takeaway in this post: Elevating people, groups (teams, communities) and networks to the same level of importance as data, information and process is long overdue.

Businesses are seeing an enormous increase in the number of remote and virtual workers—the number of teleworkers alone has increased by 150% since 1999, according to recently released research from Frost & Sullivan. Globalization is certainly a reason for the change; a company cannot have a global workforce without having some percentage of its employees work remotely from headquarters, and from one another. Other factors include the need to attract and keep quality employees; the desire to expand into new markets and regions (local or national) without expending a large amount of initial capital; and the ability to stay flexible in a fast-changing business climate.

Although both are on the rise, it’s important to remember that remote and virtual workers are not the same thing.

Remote workers work in a satellite or home office (or primarily from the road), but they may find themselves frequently, if not always, in the physical company of their co-workers, managers, and reports. On the other hand, virtual workers are situated in a different location from that of their managers, co-workers, and/or reports. A person can work out of the company’s headquarters and still be considered a “virtual worker” if the rest of his or her team is located somewhere else.

Meanwhile, distributed teams are made up of knowledge workers physically located in different places, often around the world; in today’s business and economic climate, many teams are distributed, and are, therefore, also “virtual.” For example, a distributed research and development team at a U.S. company might have designers working out of corporate headquarters in New York, while the main materials suppliers are based in South America, and the manufacturers operate out of Asia; meanwhile, various VP-level department heads who need to weigh in on product design and development may be located in cities around the world, depending on their business functions and the teams they oversee. All will need quick and easy access to collaboration tools, so they can work together on projects and new products whenever the need arises.

Whoever they are and wherever they’re located, all types of employees need to stay connected to one another and their company’s business partners and customers. We’re finding this to be a top priority for executives, roughly two-thirds of whom in a recent survey listed it as their biggest business challenge today. Not their biggest communications challenge, mind you—their biggest business challenge overall. That certainly makes technology that helps companies get and keep employees connected increasingly valuable—no wonder so many vendors are devoting so many resources toward developing newer and better tools. The question is, will they get the job done?

Last week the Collaborative Technologies Conference officially became the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.  Changing a brand can be a difficult decision.  After all, we spend so much time and energy trying to build loyalty around brands.  CTC has a very strong community of people who identify with it and trust it, which is a difficult thing to achieve.  So why change it?

I guess the best way to answer that is to start by saying that "it" — the Collaborative Technologies Conference — really won’t change, except in name. This is not about broadening the conference to be something we’re not.  And it’s definitively not an attempt to move away from the collaboration space.

Quite the opposite, in fact.  It’s about changing our perspective on — and being a better reflection of — what we’re all trying to achieve.  The goal is to build business systems that support greater agility.  It’s about more effective communication and productivity in companies, large and small. Collaboration is the cornerstone of this goal, but it is not the end game.  We’ll continue to focus the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on everything from large-scale enterprise application suites and communications infrastructure to lightweight web-based applications.  We will also continue to look at this from both technology and business perspectives and explore the changing work culture necessary to support it.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference plays an important role in bringing this community together, defining the market and the language we use to describe it.  You’ve read my short explanation of Enterprise 2.0, so now, what’s yours?  Let me know what you think at swylie@cmp.com, or using the comment section below.