Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

When I was growing up in the late 60’s early 70’s, there was an adage: “Never trust anyone over 30.”

Today, I’m seeing the same group of people say “Never trust anyone under 30.”

We might not be saying it directly, but we’re certainly implying it with the fear and loathing of collaborative tools - like RSS-enabled collaboration platforms, blogs and IM - at our employees’ disposal.

In an Internetweek article covering the Office 2.0 conference last week, I was sorry to read of the following exchange among panelists:

“David Meyer of BEA, said his company’s recently launched AquaLogic Ensemble provides IT with a layer of control on top of applications like wikis, managing who can access them. “It allows the culture of participation within boundaries,” said Meyer. (my emphasis - JLJ)

But there are also cultural and generational issues that will probably require more than a technology solution.

“I hear it every week, someone saying ‘You can’t [post] that because they think it’s going to undercut their authority,” said Meyer. Schueller of P&G agreed.

“There is a generation and expectation gap,” he said. “You talk to someone whose been successful in one operating paradigm who says ‘How do I limit this information to the people who need to know’ versus someone who can’t wait to tell everyone what they just did.”

My answer to Mr. Shueller? Trust them.

Trust is almost a foreign concept to those of us who’ve been in the work world for 20 years or more. But it certainly has been tested in the past ten years - which are arguably the most formative years of our work history for people of my generation.

While many of us watched our fathers (yes, mostly our fathers) work for 30+ years at the same company while we were growing up; we quickly figured out that our lives would be very different.

Especially those of us who got into less traditional businesses early on - technology, telecom, software, energy trading and such.

We’re the ones who are now running organizations who:

• don’t provide retirement support
• have self-insurance policies in force
• consider bagels on Thursdays as a big benefit to our employees

In a truly inspired post on trust for virtual teams, Anne Truitt Zelenka actually has the audacity to prescribe collaboration tools to help build trust among knowledge workers!

I’m with Anne.

Since our inability to trust is deep seeded, we’ve got to look at tools like Attensa’s enterprise RSS platform, Kapow Technology’s mashup platform and Lotus’ Sametime to enable our employees to facilitate trust in each other where we cannot.

Limiting information, after all, flies in the face of the values we held growing up in the 60’s and 70’s…

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?

It’s already September 10. As I get older, time flies. But this year has gone particularly fast, and every month seems to accelerate.

And I’ve just been delivered perspective on a platter.

One of my work colleagues from 10 years ago passed away, and we attended his memorial service on Friday. It was well-attended by the folks from eFusion (I love the Wayback Machine!), our common employer at the time. I reconnected with a bunch of them, most of whom looked wiser (and not much older) at all.

Some of my lessons from last week:

• People care about their co-workers. Many of us hadn’t seen each other in eight years, and we still have the drive to celebrate the lives of those we’ve shared and lost. I vow to start celebrating with those I haven’t lost more often.
• Once a nerd, always a nerd. I was reminded that Jeff Sponaugle (now CTO of KryptIQ), had a web cam set up in 1997 or so (long before any of us had ever seen one) over his garage so he could watch his paper being delivered. He delighted us with his enthusiasm for technology, and we earned early glimpses through him.
• Respect your life - it goes too quickly. Ken was only 55. He had many friends, a lovely family, and teams of engineers, professional services and (yes, even) marketing folks who loved him. He treated his co-workers with respect, honesty, and always had a ready smile for anyone who needed it.

I hope that - when it’s my time - the celebrations will continue to connect people and ideas, just as Ken’s did for me.