Social Business Community Blog
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March 29, 2011 - 2:14 PM
In the first of the series of our AIIM Social Business Roadmap blog posts, I will be looking into the topic of emergence within an organization as one of the 8 steps needed in order to be successful in this new digital age of business, social collaboration and instant results.
The way we define emergence in the roadmap is that it often takes place under the radar of management and is occurring at the organization in small pockets. This is the experimental environment cultivated from within by those who naturally seek to innovate and challenge existing or outdated business practices. However, organizations should be actively aware of whether this type of emergence is occurring within their organization, and if so, in what ways. You should be aware that there are existing technologies that could improve or positively impact internal and external business processes and should evaluate them to determine if there is value in using them.
In my own experience as a former Social Business and Enterprise 2.0 Consultant, I have been lucky to be a part of such teams like the Intellipedia Development Cell (IDC) and the CIA WIRe teams that were excellent examples of emergent thinking and technology. With the Intellipedia project, it was more than just a wiki, it was an entire suite of tools for internal enterprise collaboration such as yammer, SharePoint, our own version of YouTube called iVideo, knowledge tree document sharing, a FLICKR type photo sharing service, tagging like delicious, and the constantly mis-advertised "A-Space". A- Space was not the FaceBook for spies as many has reported it to be, rather a highly compartmented collaborative space based on level of clearance access and job function. In the real world, I would relate this to where your senior corporate staff might want to compartment off the finance and HR aspects of the company that are not ready or should have eyes within the rest of the company.
My experience within the IDC was once in a lifetime as I was able to come in to the project at the right time and brought on-board by the right people like Sean Dennehy and Don Burke. Both had a vision of how the intelligence community should collaborate and I shared that with them. I was brought on as a community manager and wiki gardener. You all will surely get to know my love for wikis and organization as I continue to blog in the AIIM community. They identified me as a like-minded champion and the IDC was our idea mill or at some times we called it a skunkworks -- for projects that spurred off the main goals of the IDC to changing other aspects of the CIA and larger Intelligence Community. It was an exciting time as what started out from a whitepaper to create wikis and blogs turned into one new tool after another to make the community thrive in the tacit knowledge of topics being shared.
After several years with the IDC, I moved on (or as some saw it -- back to) the CIA WIRe. At the WIRe I was once a graphical designer, but in round 2, I was a project manager for the Innovation team. Another chance to create emergent change at the CIA. We looked into how we could transform an agency addicted to paper into a wired one and we really pushed the envelope when it came to Agile Web Development. Each year we created a conference that would challenge the community to see beyond the tools and think about how we could and would change the culture to match what the rest of the world was doing with social media. We brought in experts in these fields like Marcia Conner, Dion Hinchcliffe and Andrew McAfee. All I feel close to friends now through my ongoing work bringing social business to life in any organization I've been a part.
And now, I am with AIIM. AIIM is now practicing our own emergence as we embrace social business and our own roadmap as we share it with the world. Our Social Business Roadmap is free for download and available under the creative commons share-alike license in which we hope you do share virally and help us improve it for future versions. You can help do this by contributing to our discussion of emergence and other steps within the roadmap by contributing to our wiki.
In the coming days and weeks, you will hear more from me and our Director of Systems of Engagement, Jesse Wikins on the 8 steps and additional aspects of the roadmap in more detail. We will be pointing out case studies and examples of each step, including the precondition.
Also, if you apply the roadmap to your organization, we would LOVE to hear from you and you can let us know about it in a comment below, on the wiki or by email. abaker@aiim.org or jwilkins@aiim.org.
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This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International
