Collaboration and social media terminology?
Categorised under: Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0
Terminology is always muddy in emerging fields, particularly where product innovation outstrips theoretical thinking. This is very much the case in the spaces of “collaboration” and “social media”.
While this is hard to avoid, it’s extremely problematic. Very different approaches and tools are lumped together, people discover they aren’t talking about the same things, and strategic thinking is impaired.
At the risk of causing more confusion, I would like to draw a line between two different approaches.
Tools for collaborating on information
There is a rapidly growing collection of tools to help people work together, sharing information and collaborating on creating new content. These are spreading like a virus through organisations, and include:
- wikis
- team spaces
- personal working spaces (“my sites”, etc)
- forums and discussion groups
These are all about information, how it is created, updated and communicated. I’m going to call these collaboration tools.
Tools for connecting people
There are also tools that specifically target the social and professional networks within organisations, and are about finding and connecting people. These include:
- “internal Facebook”
- “internal Twitter”
- expertise directories, and other extended staff directories
- instant messaging
These tools are all about people, in a very direct sense. They are about recognising, building and sustaining the human connections within organisations, which underpin how work is really done.
I’m going to call these social tools (or perhaps social media tools).
Blurring the lines
There are, of course, tools that don’t fit neatly into these categories, or span both. You could even argue that the best tools are ones that incorporate aspects of both, bringing together people and information.
Why does this matter?
These two classes of tools work in very different ways. They have different goals, practices and methodologies. They address different needs within the organisation, even as the goal is to bring them together.
I believe there are two very different discussions to be had in the context of today’s tools. I’d therefore like some lines drawn, so we all know what we are talking about.
What are your thoughts?
Tags: Collaboration, social software
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 
4 Comments:
This is a very timely post. I’m preparing a presentation on the topic of how web2.0 technologies can address the challenges of sharing information, finding information and reducing the use of e-mail within an organization. For sharing information, I’ve broken it down into communicate (blog, webcast, podcast, intranets), exchange (surveys, transactions), dialogue (discussion boards, instant messaging) and collaborate (shared workspaces, wikis, netmeetings, workflow).
I’m also finding that in a conservative culture, the terms used with “social media” often have negative connotations, resulting in web2.0 technology being intruduced using different terms to accomplish the same outcome. For example, a blog from the president of a company officially starts off as an “on-line quarterly update” using blog technology. Over time, the acceptance of the media and methods means that the updates become more frequent and the original purpose occurs organically,albeit more slowly
James,
Timely post for me also – the March IntranetsLive event two days ago had a very interesting slide which outlined how governance models need to change – part of a report by IBF (I think, don’t have my notes).
The basic premise of the slide was to differentiate, in the same way you have, governance.
The three areas were: task, people, tool.
I’ll post on my blog in the next couple of weeks the detail of the slide (and slide if I’m able to) so everyone can draw their own conclusions.
DorejM
@Janet, that’s a superb list of categories, much better than mine!
In light of the post, perhaps the category that is missing is “connect”, and then the set is complete …
I’m also a fan of the evolutionary approach. At the IntraTeam conference in Denmark yesterday, Richard Dennisson from BT talked about “evolution rather than revolution”. He highlighted that talk of revolution scared people (particularly IT), was counterproductive, and probably unrealistic. Instead, taking an evolutionary approach, like the one you’ve outlined, allows progress to be steadily made. Good stuff.
@Dorje, interesting as ever. The “task, people, tool” is very similar to the age-old KM model of people, process, technology (and more recently, content).