Social Computing and Collaboration in the Enterprise

Today’s enterprise knowledge workers (KWs) use social computing tools to get their work done. They blog, create podcasts and produce content for wikis. They subscribe to RSS feeds, join social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, and employ shared content tagging. All of this is done to overcome the barriers to efficient collaboration posed by a distributed workforce that spans geographies and time zones. Although developed for the consumer market, these tools play an increasingly important role in business settings.

Social computing technologies often cause a lot of handwringing among chief information officers and chief security officers because they typically operate outside of corporate information policies. KWs have been ahead of the curve in adopting the social computing paradigm and enterprise IT is struggling to catch up and maintain control of information while giving knowledge workers what they want.

Collaboration is absolutely necessary to the work of the enterprise. It’s also messy, hard to control, and sensitive to the constraints of time and distance. Throwing social computing tools into the breach to make collaboration easier and more efficient follows a long line of previous efforts. KWs have been using email for collaboration since day one. Shared digital workspaces that feature services such as document sharing, calendaring and task tracking allow groups of authenticated individuals—employees, customers, suppliers and partners—to increase productivity, improve decision-making and improve the efficiency of collaborative team efforts. Of course, these workspaces—think SharePoint as one example—tend to create information silos that proliferate quickly and often go unmanaged by any central information system or policy.

Information—Too Much of a Good Thing
As digital information grows at an exponential rate, it simply adds to the inherent difficulties that collaboration entails. In 2006, the world created, captured and replicated more than 150 exabytes of digital information—enough to hold 3 million copies of every book ever written.1 Between 2006 and 2011, the information added annually to this digital universe will increase to nearly 1,800 exabytes. That’s a compound growth rate of almost 60%.2

These numbers strain the imagination. We can define an exabyte in terms of equivalent petabytes, terabytes, gigabytes and so forth...but what does it really mean? Well, in simpler terms, one exabyte is the equivalent of 50,000 years of DVD quality video.3 We create some 20 exabytes of data just by telephone every year!4 Bret Swanson, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, calls this rapid expansion of the digital universe "the exaflood."

Within the contemporary enterprise, the exaflood affects everyone, but it most acutely impacts two groups—knowledge workers and IT.

Knowledge workers engage in a great variety of activities. A stock broker is a knowledge worker. So is a product manager, an architect, an industrial designer and a marketing communications specialist. KWs tend to work in teams and collaborate with others. And they usually work with many types of content. KWs need flexible tools that can be configured and personalized to help them manage the information they use every day faster and more easily.

As the content environment grows—as much as 200% annually—CIOs are expected to use their resources to meet the enterprise objectives of lower costs, reduced security and compliance risk and improved strategic use of information. They look for process improvements and new technologies to connect those processes with people and information. IT must deliver these improvements and technologies while it faces unrelenting pressure to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) for a growing number of mission-critical enterprise applications.

ECM to the Rescue?
So right now, enterprises struggle to deal with three urgent needs:

• The need to cope effectively with an enormous—and rapidly growing—volume of information;
• The need to support streamlined collaboration among a far-flung workforce; and
• The need to control the information under its stewardship for compliance and corporate governance purposes.

Efficiently managing large volumes of disparate and distributed content sits squarely in the wheelhouse of enterprise content management (ECM). ECM provides the capability to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver information according to organizational processes. Utilizing technologies, such as document and records management, workflow and forms processing, controlled lifecycles, storage management, categorization, indexing and content syndication, it can:

• Eliminate information silos;
• Ease the complexity and burdens of compliance;
• Enforce retention policies and brand standards;
• Enable the repurposing of content;
• Streamline business processes;
• Provide greater security for sensitive content;
• Accelerate new product development through enhanced content dissemination; and
• Increase efficiency and reduce costs.

There should be a natural fit between the capabilities of ECM and the challenges of a content environment made more complex by social computing. For example, as KWs create blogs, how will their content be managed and protected? Much of the information is likely to be proprietary—a company’s hard-won intellectual property. Moreover, as blogs proliferate into the thousands, how will they be discovered and used effectively as reference? The same concerns cloud the enterprise future of wikis. Regardless of how content is created, for its maximum value to be realized and its risk mitigated, it needs to be archived, managed via a lifecycle and accessible to workflow and other business processes.

It’s clear that KWs and the IT functions that support them need the benefits of ECM more than ever. But as a recent Forrester report points out, "Despite the priority and investment IT organizations make in ECM, most I&KM (information and knowledge management) pros shake their heads in dismay as one ECM initiative after another fails to be adopted by businesspeople. We’ve found that most ECM failures can be attributed to an ECM teams’ poor understanding of business context—how business people and business processes use content. In short, for many business people, the hassle of using the ECM system exceeds the system’s value."5