New logo, new identity, new website

It’s exciting times for us here at Noko. We’re really pleased to be launching our new identity, strategy and focus on Enterprise 2.0.

Ever since Steve and I started the company way (way, way) back in the Autumn of 1995 we’ve always been fascinated with how the web can be used by business to improve communication and collaboration.

We originally started building websites for a somewhat sceptical client base (I’m sure I’ve still got my “What is the World-Web Web?” and “Why the Web is not passing a fad” presentations on a network drive somewhere), but quickly moved on to creating intranet and extranet applications that used the Internet to connect staff, customers and partners more effectively.

Web Content Management

We soon realised that manual website editing was becoming a bottleneck for many companies and so began a partnership with Immediacy and their excellent Web Content Management system (now named Alterian CMC), which enabled us to deliver far more useful and complex sites.

Enterprise 2.0

A while ago the rise of enterprise social software caused us to sit up and take notice. We’ve always been cautious of jumping on the next ‘Internet bandwagon’ but the more we investigated, the more we liked and the more interested we became.

We’re sold on enterprise social software

We're convinced that over the next few years the use of enterprise social software (Enterprise 2.0) will fundamentally change how many workers interact with their colleagues and the wider business world, removing many of the more rigid and traditional collaboration barriers to create a more collaborative, knowledgeable, mobile and people oriented workplace.

That’s why we’ve refocused Noko around a new strap line of Knowledge. Collaboration. Communication.

Ok, but what's the business value?

On our travels we meet many organisations facing similar business challenges:

• Information overload
• Managing an increasingly mobile and geographically distributed workforce
• Managing team collaboration and information sharing
• Capturing the knowledge, experience and wisdom of the organisation
• Managing complex intranets, extranets and websites

Applied intelligently Enterprise 2.0 will help solve these challenges and deliver more knowledgeable, collaborative and profitable organisations.

We’re looking forward to taking both existing and new clients on this new journey so if you’re interested in finding out more why not get in touch.

Enterprise 2.0 Case Study: Intel’s Enterprise Social Computing Strategy

An interesting new whitepaper from Intel’s Social Computing team discusses their approach and experience of planning and delivering the first stage of their enterprise-wide social software initiative.

Intel views enterprise social software as central to addressing some of the most important organisation-wide business challenges facing their business: improving collaboration, sharing information, creating professional networks and fostering innovation.

Enterprise 2.0 planning

As well as covering key business challenges the case study also discusses the team's approach to finding the current collaboration pain points of their colleagues, achieving management support for initiatives, assessing the risks and (most importantly) a review of the functionality.

It’s definitely a worthwhile read if you’re currently planning a business case or researching how enterprise social software can be exploited within your own organisation.

Conclusion: Phase one was a “moderate success”

During the initial stage Intel limited itself to delivering improved versions of existing capabilities such as blogs and forums, and starting to add some professional networking capabilities.

The overall conclusions are interesting. The project team report that the first phase has been a ‘moderate success’, citing improvements in the dissemination of information and innovative ideas as the main benefits (they discuss how one particular blog post generated an overwhelming response from throughout the business).

Delivering a subset of social technologies may provide limited value!

The Intel team have concluded that it's extremely important to implement the full 'social computing stack' to achieve the maximum enterprise-wide value, and have decided to accelerate delivery of the project.

Planning for success

It’s worth bearing the above point in mind when planning your own projects – If you’re beginning your enterprise 2.0 journey by implementing an enterprise wiki (for example), it is important to try and find specific collaboration challenges within your business to solve and set realistic expectations of the results.

That way you'll be able to gain management buy-in to expand the implementation and introduce enterprise 2.0 to a wider audience - and that's when you'll start to see the true business value of enterprise social software: an environment where colleagues can share knowledge and expertise, collaborate effectively, find experts and build wide ranging professional social networks.

You can download the full case study here from the Intel website.

If you're currently researching enterprise social software it's also worthwhile taking the time to review some of the many enterprise 2.0 tools on offer and see how they can be combined to create a social computing environment (the Booze Allen Hamilton video case study that I blogged about recently is a good place to start).

Using a throwaway wiki to get I.T. and management buy-in

So how do you get your organisation to think seriously about implementing an Enterprise Wiki? Why not take it upon yourself to take the first step?

Using a throwaway test wiki is a proven wiki adoption technique also known as Flying Under the Radar (FUR), or the Wiki Ninja technique.

Jakob Nielsen recently posted the results of his research into Social Networking on Intranets and how large companies are coping with the buzz around Enterprise 2.0 adoption.

He makes an interesting point about the most successful initiatives:

[...] in our studies, successful social media initiatives at many companies emerged from underground, grassroots efforts. This might be surprising, as companies often keep a tight rein on technology initiatives and force all employees into a standard desktop build, right down to a mandated version of the Web browser. Underground adoption of off-the-shelf Web 2.0 tools seems a little out of character, but users are more likely than executives to see the tools' value and translate that value to an internal use.

...He goes on to explain that his research into organsiations such as Sun Microsystems, BT, IBM and AXA UK has thrown up the following points that are of particular interest for those of us striving to encourage adoption of social software within large organisations:

1. Underground efforts yield big results
2. Frontline workers are driving the vision

In this post I'd like to encourage the use of these guerrilla tactics in order to introduce the concept of a Wiki to your organisation. We'll be looking at how to implement one without stepping on the toes of your management or IT team, and some practical uses of a Wiki in an enterprise environment.

What is a throwaway test wiki?

If you're interested in introducing team wiki collaboration into your company but are finding it hard to convince others of the usefulness of a wiki, or lack experience in how a wiki might be used in practice you should try setting up a throwaway test wiki.

The basic idea is to:

• set a wiki up "under the radar" (i.e. no IT dept or executive involvement) using one of the many free or low cost on-line services
• test it's practical use with a small team and project (or even just part of a project)
• get other team members familiar with the concept of a wiki
• use the experience to provide a case for wiki adoption to senior management
• be able to throw the wiki away (after exporting any experience or knowledge you want to keep)

The concept of the wiki being throwaway is important for 2 reasons:

1. It encourages experiment; it doesn't matter if you try something and it ends up not working because you're going to throw it away anyway
2. If your I.T. dept find out that you've been storing project information outside of the normal channels you can reassure them that you are making regular copies of the definitive version of the information contained on your test wiki and storing it in the normal way.

Setting up your throwaway test wiki

We'll suggest some wiki services in a later post (if you have any ideas, please do comment), but you're looking for a free-to-register hosted wiki service that will allow you to:

• Add several team members to a workspace
• Create wiki pages that your team can collaborate on
• See document history (check how easy it is to see the differences between each document revision)
• Export, or at least copy-and paste the content of your pages back into the work-flow that your organisation regularly uses

What are you going to use it for?

First, a caveat: Be sensitive to your organisation's information policy. Ask yourself if the information your team will be working on is too sensitive to have a copy of it stored outside your company's network. Pick a scenario that is suitably safe!

I'm going to suggest that you try collaborating on a document that requires several people's input. For a Noko project, for example, we set up pages for initial project requirements and the specification document. From there several people can collaborate on the document, or make comments for others to review. So something like a project spec, or a piece of documentation would be a good bet - anything that several people need input on and may well get updated over an extended period of time.

During the project, rather than discussing changes to spec over email, update the project spec wiki page and drop an email to all the team members if you need to notify them of the change (or get them to subscribe to the RSS feed of that wiki page). You may also find your free hosted wiki offers to email your team for you each time you make a change.

Choose the wiki content carefully. Ideally you want to ensure everyone on your team can edit the wiki page, that it's appropriate for them to do so, and you don't need to keep registering new users who are outside your core team. For instance, if you run a development team and want to use the wiki to prepare meeting agendas / notes then using it for your development meetings that involve your close team members would be fine. However if you start using it for a high-level project meeting you might find it inconvenient to start giving lots of other people access to your test wiki to whom you are not so close.

Encourage your team to use the wiki for any other documents that they wish to collaborate on.

Team rules

1. If required, take a regular version of the wiki content and save it outside of the wiki in the way your company expects you to save that information. This is obviously something you wouldn't need to do if you had an official company wiki, but you're covering yourselves here. Internally you may as well keep the project appearing as normal as possible. You're using the wiki as an experiment on the side, not a replacement (yet!). If you explain it this way to your IT department before you start, and tell them you won't need any support from them, and you're going to throw it away afterwards in order to come to them and ask for advice on a corporate wiki they will likely love you forever!
2. Experiment! You're going to throw the wiki away afterwards so encourage your team to experiment with any sort of collaborative document, even if it ends up not working. Set up a page on the wiki that lists the scenarios that your team have tried, whether they did or didn't work, and get the team to contribute their findings to that page.

Using a throwaway wiki to get I.T. and Management buy-in

Once you have your Wiki in place and have proved it's worth as a tool you are in a much better position to explain the benefits to others using practical use examples that are relevant to your own organisation. It's time to take the Wiki higher up the ladder to sell the concept with a view to, at the very least, promote discussion, or in a perfect scenario have your organisation begin the process of discovering how a Wiki can be of use before implementing their chosen Enterprise Wiki.You may even be able to use the Import function of the new Wiki to import your work from your throwaway Wiki project.

If you have already implemented a Wiki in this way, please let me know how it went and if you have any insights to add.

Good luck!