Ask the Experts: Oscar Berg

This is a contributed guest post from Oscar Berg, collaboration consultant and writer of The Content Economy. This is part of  an ongoing series of guest interviews and discussions with industry experts. For past interviews, see our Ask the Experts page.

How long have you been a collaboration advocate, what got you into the space in the first place, and what type of consulting do you provide for companies?

Oscar Berg: I have been designing and implementing collaborative processes, practices and solutions since I began my career as a consultant in the second half of the 1990s.

In 2002 I became painfully aware of the cultural challenges of collaboration as I became responsible for establishing processes, practices and solutions for multi-site software development. Although we used new and easy to use technologies such as VOIP, Instant Messaging and wikis to coordinate work within our virtual teams, I came to understand how much successful collaboration actually has to do with sharing a common culture and practices. The technology was the easy part, while the hard part was about designing and adopting good practices and building culture of collaboration.

Today I help customers to define and implement new collaborative processes, practices and solutions. I focus on strategy, requirements and facilitating change and adoption of new practices. It also happens that I use my skills as an old interaction designer to design collaboration solutions.

There are many different interpretations and definitions of social collaboration.  What is your “official definition” and what does it mean to you?

“Social software is used to enable many-to-many interaction, conversations, sharing and co-creation.”

Oscar Berg: Social collaboration is when people collaborate to achieve a goal or purpose and where social software is used to enable many-to-many interaction, conversations, sharing and co-creation.

Social collaboration builds upon principles such as openness, participation, recognition, dialog, pull and simplicity and is supported by social software mechanisms such as ratings, links, tagging, signals, filters and extensions.

You talk about re-engineering existing behaviors and practices to get workers to adopt social collaboration tools. While this is easier within the enterprise, how can you encourage external users (clients, vendors, partners) to adopt the tools?

Oscar Berg: I am actually not so sure that it is easier to re-engineer existing behaviors and practices within an organization than it is to make people change their behaviors and practices when collaborating with individuals from “the outside”.

“The culture within an organization is often the main barrier to change and adoption of new practices and tools.”

The culture includes well established norms for how to communicate and with whom. To change these norms is often more difficult than you might think.

When communicating and collaborating with external individuals, we don’t share the same culture. We can’t rely on established communication and collaboration. We might also be more open-minded when collaborating with new people as we know that we cannot force our own behaviors on a stranger. Instead, there are often other barriers which are more important when it comes to hindering collaboration between individuals from different organizations, such as security restrictions which make it hard for users to access shared collaboration environments or which does not allow information to be shared outside the firewall. Another barrier is the lack of integration with other environments and systems inside the collaborating organizations.

What are some ways in which enterprises/businesses can measure the ROI of their social collaboration tools?

Oscar Berg: ROI can be quite easily calculated when you drill down to specific use cases or problems which can be addressed with social collaboration. For example, you can use task analysis to identify the potential to optimize the execution of key knowledge worker tasks such as coauthoring, sharing information or getting questions answered. You can calculate ROI based on estimated savings in work hours.

Enterprises/businesses who understand that communication and collaboration underpins virtually all value creation are probably willing to explore any opportunity to improve communication and collaboration that shows up. Since social collaboration tools and technologies can be explored with relatively small investments compared to traditional IT investments such as ERP implementations, focusing on ROI too early might make them too focused on finding and addressing specific tasks or problems. As a result, they might miss out on the value creation that is likely to come from a generally better connected and engaged workforce in the form of increased innovation, agility and employee productivity.

What are your  social collaboration predictions for 2011?

Oscar Berg: Here are three short ones:

• The intranet is the natural place to introduce social collaboration technologies and I expect that the trend with social intranets will continue to grow during 2011.

• Micro-blogging seems to be a gateway to the enterprise for social collaboration technologies and I expect micro-blogging will become more commonplace within enterprises.

“Micro-blogging will become more commonplace within enterprises.”

• Community management will receive increased attention. Many large and distributed enterprises are seeing the need to enable horizontal information sharing between different locations and business units in order to faster solve problems, identify and act on opportunities, capture and capitalize on ideas, and share successful practices. Community management is a way to make that happen.

Leave your questions and comments for Oscar below. To connect with Oscar directly and read more of his collaboration insights, you can follow him on Twitter or check out The Content Economy.