Socialtext hosted a webinar today entitled Social Computing Redefines Collaboration. The speakers were Rob Koplowitz (Forrester Research) and Ross Mayfield (Socialtext). The audio quality from WebEx wasn't great (even though I dialed in on a phone), but here's my notes. There were over 200 attendees.

Communities Drive Knowledge Continuity (Rob Koplowitz) 

Rob says that he likes what Socialtext is doing, because they always bring the conversation back to business value. The problem we're trying to solve is the sharing of knowledge across all people in the organization … it's always going to be a challenge, but the new social media tools represent a major transition.

Major theme: "Knowledge workers are our most powerful untapped resource; their value magnifies over time."

What does IT do? It has invested in clear ROI projects … particularly structured human activities and system-intensive processes; but it's paid less attention to ad hoc, messy, chaotic human activities. Now that most organizations have pretty much invested in the structured side, there's no clear competitive advantage options available. So attention is shifting to the ad hoc human activities. Eg, change requests, process collaboration, creating business proposals … and these can be measured.

Some major transitions: there are new technologies that can be had for an order of magnitude less cost. The new technologies enable people to ask questions like: "Who in my social network can help me answer the questions that I'm facing in my transactional process."

Forrester Research survey in October 2007 found that about 50% of its surveyed organizations thought that setting a collaboration strategy was a critical or high priority for 2008. And nearly 25% of organizations said that a "Web 2.0 technology" was a priority. Some of this is part of the collaboration piece, and some of this is risk mitigation to stop employees using Internet based services. Rob thinks that this latter number has jumped during the past 12 months.

Rob talked about the concept of "knowledge gaps". Eg, in standard systems like ERP and CRM, there are moves to integrate collaborative capabilities. Eg2, in cross-organizational workflows, we have different systems. How do we "close the gap"? Rob talked about culture, integration, etc.

A main point: communities operate in different ways from work groups.
– communities drive serendipitious learnings 

– communities magnify the value of information 

– communities make content renewable 

– transparency is becoming an imperative

Summary: 

– Knowledge workers are our differentiation, not manufacturing cost or prowess 

– strategies are in development today 

– address knowledge continuity as part of your strategy 

– communities are incredibly efficient at managing intellectual capital and expertise identification 

– there are big wins that can come from small investments 

– but don't lose sight of the big picture 

Ross Mayfield 

Socialtext has been around for about 6 years, and now serves 4000 customers.

An academic paper in 1973 wrote a paper about the power of weak ties; other research looked at the strong center in collaborations; and then other research looked at the power of combining the two — a strong center group as well as discovery of other people who could help from the outside.

Some questions: 

– How does your organization manage the attention of its employees? What do they pay attention to? 

– How do your employees collaborate? Is it productive? 

– How do you discover expertise within your organization? Is it efficient? Are there things that are getting in the way? 

These lead to the building blocks in the Socialtext product … attention, discovery and collaboration.

Ross then showed a demonstration of Socialtext 3.0.