The Economist reports on the fiasco of using Facebook (or, we would argue any social networking site) within Enterprises with this example of two airlines - British Airways & Virgin Airlines

Here is an excerpt:

“AS WELL as embracing blogs, firms have been exploiting social networks such as Facebook and MySpace to get their messages to a broader audience. But although they have the potential to be useful marketing tools, such networks can also be a source of damaging publicity, as British Airways (BA) and Virgin Atlantic have discovered to their cost.

On October 31st Virgin fired 13 of its cabin crew who had posted derogatory comments about its safety standards and some of its passengers on a Facebook forum. Among other things, crew members joked that some Virgin planes were infested with cockroaches and described customers as “chavs”, a disparaging British term for people with flashy bad taste. On November 3rd BA began investigating the behaviour of several employees who had described some passengers as “smelly” and “annoying” in Facebook postings………” read more

So the lesson here is to create and follow some rules in embracing social networking within the enterprise.

Write to us at info@collabor.com to  request our new whitepaper on Collaboration Beehive which lists down 10 things to keep in mind which building a collaboration environment.

What a grand idea? Let us innovate together. Easier said than done, though. Let us explore why it could be akin to pulling teeth out as we try to innovate collaboratively using current technology.

Granted, innovation leads to its need for documents, spreadsheets, presentations and research. However the most predominant way today to handle these documents is via email, a batch process if there was one - leading to a lot of time (and bandwidth) consumed in sending version of documents to each other as attachments. This hardly is collaboration and actually defocusses the team from the core task of innovation and becomes an exercise in document management, version control and other “process” items.

What is required is for a platform that becomes a seamless, non-intrusive, enabling partner in the innovation process. What is needed is for this platform to use existing applications like DMS (document management systems), CMS (content management systems), Knowledge Repositories (SharePoint, eRoom, etc) and other tools like file sharing, web meetings, etc and overlay them with a company specific “Collaborative Innovation” model.

A platform that can tie-in all the systems that exist, with collaboration tools including written, audio and video, with the ability to create task-force groups for specific initiatives, and allow employees to network crossing organizational hierarchies, geographies, timezones and boundaries. A platform that adapts to an organizational collaboration process or enables one. A platform that is so seamless and intuitive, that nobody feels overwhelmed by it and hence it works. A platform that can be customized to include initiative specific features and functionality (for e.g a R&D group in a Consumer Electronics company will have different demands than a Green Initiative Group for a construction company).

Work 2.0, our Online Community & Collaboration Platform, is one such platform.

• It allows multiple tools for users to collaborate: blogs, Q&A, forums, IM
• It allows multiple media: written, audio and video
• It allows the creation of unlimited Groups: create Innovation groups and more mundane ones like car-pooling and new hire orientation. Each group replicated the complete community functionality for its members
• it allows employee networking: strong user profiles of all employees across the company, allowing them to network with each other based on common experiences, backgrounds, roles or ideas
• it allows customization: extend the platform by building specific extensions like  collaborative software development, investor relations managements, or customer facing collaborative portals, etc
• it allows application integration: Our platform does not need re-creating (or re-investing) in CMS, DMS, videoconferencing or knowledge repositories. We can integrate with back-end applications that you are already invested in in one of three way: Pre-Integrated Applications, Visual Integration or Custom Integration

At Collabor, our goal with Work 2.0 is to be the primary platform which enables Innovation, Knowledge Sharing, Productivity Increase through Collaboration.

So, you see - ITS EASIER DONE, THAN SAID

Collaboration is often stated, and most misunderstood. In an enterprise context, we took a stab at the different “types” of Collaboration and thought it was necessary to build a Capability Maturity Model, akin to the CMM model the Software Engineering Institute that was propogated by Carnegie Mellon University.

Enclosed is our 4 Level Collaboration Maturity Model. Feel free to tag you company as per this model. Of course,  Level 4 can be achieved by using Collabor’s Work 2.0 Collaboration Community Platform.