Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I once heard someone say:

• a forum is a virtual water cooler
• a blog is a virtual printing press
• a wiki is a virtual white board

Like their virtual metaphors, they’re excellent point solutions, but none of them are good collaboration platforms for knowledge workers in the enterprise.

Effective enterprise collaboration platforms do the following three things for teams of 10 or 300:

1. Improve collection and capture of knowledge and attention
2. Facilitate many-to-many conversations about pressing business issues
3. Enable immediate response to business information

Good collaboration platforms have:

• The immediacy of radio or television
• The detail of newspapers or magazines
• The sustainability of billboards

Scott over at Attensa spoke at the Office 2.0 conference last week about how Attensa used the combination of Clearspace from Jive Software and Attensa’s enterprise RSS platform as their internal collaboration platform.

In doing so, Attensa cut email in the company by more than 30%.

Collaboration grew and email noise was cut because Attensa used a collaboration platform that anyone in the enterprise could use.

That’s the first essential of a good collaboration platform:

1. Usability across the general population

Clearspace uses common language and an easy to understand publishing metaphor to share information.

Which is exactly why Wikis are not good enterprise-level collaboration tools. Scott’s slide show is online here - and my favorite slide is this, which says it all:

For my readers who are not familiar with HTML, the first line is an HTML indicator of a headline (”h3“), and is wrapped (”*“) by some HTML code (”& n b s p ;“) for emphasis.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I dislike Wikis as collaboration tools for everyone… In fact, I believe Wikis are excellent tools for some pockets in organizations, especially technical teams.

They’re not, however, appropriate at all for non-HTML-savvy knowledge workers in the enterprise. Which is the preponderance of us.

Blogging software is the only tool that anyone in the enterprise can use (of the three options above).

Why? Because most blogging software hides its HTML publishing roots; and doesn’t require a boat load of patience or technical know-how in order to get up and running quickly on it…

Based on my first essential, you might think email would be a good collaboration tool, because of ubiquity, usability and adoption in the enterprise. Let me just say this, and get it out of the way:

Email is no longer a good collaboration tool.

I’m personally very email-centric in my approach to communications, but not for effective collaboration. Why?

The second essential element in a good collaboration platform:

2. The platform is time-sensitive itself, and enables immediate response

Time-sensitive information becomes stale quickly. According to the SPAM Filter Review, the average person has 3.1 email addresses to check. I’ve got 6.

If I’m not checking the right email account at the right time, I’m hosed.

In fact (and I could be ashamed to admit this, but I’m not) I’ve got 194 items in my inbox right now that I’ve read and kept in my inbox because they deserve some part of my attention.

How long do you think it’ll be before I get to each of them?

With RSS, I’m immediately alerted to information as it breaks. I know immediately when someone has responded to my question online - or has found the information I needed to get the next-step of my project done.

With Attensa’s one-click republishing, I can immediately respond to that information and post it immediately, from wherever I’m getting my answers. And (more importantly) everyone else will know my response, too.

Which brings me to my third essential quality of a good collaboration platform:

3. Anyone can choose to be informed, and everyone gains knowledge

This is where email fails. In most businesses, email is retained and treated as a corporate asset by IT. And as a business asset it’s unwieldy and largely unsearchable - unless you’re in IT or in litigation - then watch out!

In true enterprise collaboration platforms, the assets of the business are captured by- and for- the entire organization. They’re easily searched and retained in an accessible forum (no pun intended) for everyone.

And most importantly, anyone can subscribe to (and just simply listen), or participate in any business discussion that interests them.

If I want to be in on conversations about a particular issue or product, I can subscribe to their feeds. I don’t have to wait to be invited into the email thread (or roped into the email thread) based on someone else’s vision of my need to know.

Imagine the cross-training possibilities.

Imagine the ideas that might bubble up from anywhere.

Imagine the competitive information you might track - with every ear and eye and mind (that is working for the business anyway) could capture and share.

Start with one group. See how it works. Then share the knowledge across your entire organization. But do it quickly. Why wait?