Jim McGee points to this interview with Jordan Frank with a particular emphasis on Jordan's opening idea of "the responsibility to collaborate." Jordan Frank on 'responsibility to collaborate' - lessons in enterprise 2.0 implementations.
Jordan Frank is VP of Sales and Business Development for Traction Software. Last Fall, Paula Thornton ( @rotkapchen) interviewed Jordan during Traction's annual user group meeting.
[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AYGs8XMC]
The idea behind "responsibility to collaborate" is that the world of work has shifted from my value being solely about I know, though that is still important. Now it is just as important to spread the word and bring together my ideas with those of others in a more open way. This also plays at a group level, where collective responsibility to work together and learn from one another can elevate the level of conversation for people the next time they have an official business meeting. Imagine having issues established and discussed in an easily-accessible way (instead of behind closed doors or even at the water cooler).
Jordan also talks about people whose job it is to collect and process information, such as those who do competitive intelligence. It's so much effective for them to share what they are collecting and their expert commentary on it - it's already what they do for themselves. Opening it to colleagues can help raise the level of intelligence gathering and understanding of the whole organization.
About halfway through the interview, Jordan talks about dealing with business processes in the blinding light of reality and when those processes don't go as expected. It is here that human beings MUST become involved, and they can't be surprised that they are asked to be involved. So, there are those day-to-day knowledge processes that they need to be following and participating in. No handing off responsibility to "the system." This reminds me of Sig Rinde's idea of Barely Repeatable Processes. That's exactly where humans need to become involved. Jordan provides a couple examples of how that might work too. (And, of course, how Traction does a great job of making this work.)
Documents lock up whatever is in them - documents in the sense of a FILE. The information is there, but people have to dive into the document and extract it and ponder it or reprocess it. The beauty things like wiki's and other more open tools (Traction) is that the information that had been locked away can be made available to the larger organization. This takes the discussion back to the idea that if we have a responsibility to collaborate that the organization (and its tools) have a responsibility to let it happen.
And that last idea is going to be the subject of some more pondering. As you know, just because the tools are there doesn't mean the other barriers and hurdles to this are simply going to melt away.
Disclaimer: Jordan and I have had coffee together - he bought.