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Loading ...I had been using Caucus software since 1993 when I joined the gang at Meta Systems and their virtual online community, The Meta Network. I co-taught the first accredited online high school course in creative writing, called Education for the Arts, and then joined Caucus Systems, a startup comprised of all the people I admired: Frank Burns, Scott Burns, Lisa King, etc.
It was there I met Tom Mandel. I just discovered that, while I was at Caucus, Tom penned a white paper, entitled, How Companies Think: Creating Collaborative Intelligence Online. How did I know? I have been bumping into the white paper being sourced. Awesome. Maybe Caucus Systems and Tom Mandel invented Web2.0 and Enterprise2.0 and not all the other also-rans. Bloody small world, isn’t it?
How Companies Think: Creating Collaborative Intelligence Online
Tom Mandel, Caucus Consortium, August 1999
IntroductionIn a global knowledge economy, companies must constantly increase the rate at which they innovate business practices and improve their products and services in order to keep pace with the tempo of markets worldwide. If it hopes to prosper in a rapidlyshifting environment, a company must learn quickly and make smart decisions consistently.To achieve these goals, organizations must leverage not only their corporate data and information assets but also and especially the collective knowledge of employees around the world. Organizations must sharpen their ability to enhance, shape and focus corporate intelligence.
In this briefing paper, we will examine the role of online communities of practice and action in this effort and discuss their effect on building the successful companies of the twenty-first century.
The History of Conversation
Organizations begin in collaborative conversations – when people meet to hammer out a mission and a business plan, when they start laying down their common understandings in practice, when they begin to develop customer, supplier and partner relationships. As an organization grows, the core business process of conversation is distributed to management and project teams, but it does not change.
Overall, these business conversations have two goals:
- find accurate data and information in order to be driven by it, and
- create a collective intelligence and culture that tells the company where and how to drive.
High-capacity corporate computing has led to huge growth in the ability to achieve the first of these goals: to acquire, process, store, and distribute data and information. This growth is continuing, supported by new technologies like data warehousing, decision support systems, multi-dimensional databases, and knowledge management systems.
But, these computing capabilities are insufficient by themselves to support the second goal of collectively reaching a shared intelligence and a productive company culture. Corporate computing has provided companies with facilities to aggregate, analyze, and distribute information, necessary resources but insufficient to create the productive human frameworks where knowledge is created and enhanced for the company as a whole. Acquiring and managing information does not by itself create or support the interactive processes that arrive at collective company intelligence.
To reach their second goal, organizations get their employees together in formal meetings and other less formal conversational settings – not merely to exchange information with each other but to actively contribute to a growing, dynamic common knowledge. This collective competency exceeds the sum of what all employees know and can do individually.
Traditionally, organizations have relied on travel-to meetings to attain this result. In these meetings they deploy valuable corporate business processes to shape a growing company intelligence that orients successful action. In essence, these corporate business processes are meeting-templates for planning, decision-making, etc.
This way of doing things has remained essentially the same over the last millennium or more. It has not changed, because it works. Conversational meeting frameworks for planning, decision-making, learning and action are at the heart of every human enterprise.
The Evolution of Conversational Intelligence
What has changed, however, is the scale of enterprise itself. We are now in an environment in which markets are global and change increasingly quickly, and employees are located around the world. Increasingly, in this new economy, value propositions are directly based on knowledge, and it is more and more critical to hold the meetings and other company conversations that enhance knowledge.
Unfortunately, it is also more and more difficult to schedule these meetings. Global enterprises find it virtually impossible to deploy their valuable business processes flexibly enough, often enough, and with enough reach to meet their need to learn, plan, decide, and act in a global marketplace.
For this reason, more and more leading companies are beginning to investigate online, intranet-based venues for meetings, conferences, and corporate processes. Online meetings and events represent a category of corporate computing very different from the shared databases and document repositories of traditional groupware and messaging systems, which are essentially electronic filing cabinets. Knowledge management systems, which offer advanced capabilities to aggregate and articulate the contents of online repositories, are also quite different from the schedule- and activitydriven templates of a meeting process, Instead, online meetings and events are virtual places, characterized by productive, interactive frameworks, where people actively engage in structured conversational applications focused on organizational learning, virtual teaming, strategic development, and all the other activities aimed at increasing the collective intelligence of the company – the shared knowledge and understandings that drive effective action.
Collaborative Intelligence in Action
Why are these online conversational venues so useful? Why, in fact, are they a necessary component of success in the twenty-first century? Why? – because of the nature of corporate knowledge. The most valuable knowledge in corporate life today is often
- implicit – located in unstructured documents and requiring collaborative interpretation or
- tacit – held in the mind, but probably not written anywhere.
In fact, the greater part of an enterprise’s assets often consists in intellectual capital locked in the minds of company employees. This knowledge often includes complex, tacit expertise such as company methodologies for formulating and solving problems, skills obtained on the job, and corporate best practices. Knowledge of this kind does not lend itself to being presented as abstract information. It is difficult to elicit except in conversational meetings where work is actually done, while individuals witness, absorb, and add to each other’s knowledge.
Conversations are key. In fact, conversation is the core business process required to discover and elaborate this most important kind of company knowledge. People must discuss and re-discuss relevant concepts, information and activities in groups of people that include a range of different, potentially synergistic kinds of knowledge relevant to the problem or opportunity at hand. It is for these reasons that professionals attend conferences, teams hold meetings, management committees have agenda-driven meetings, organizations employ strategic planning processes, etc.
Online environments where these collaborative business processes can easily take place, and where the results of collaboration can be captured for re-use, must be available as an integrated part of work. Instead of being limited by expensive travel-to meetings, which are increasingly impractical in a world of global enterprises, employees must be able to stay put — yet meet online using virtual conference facilities. This allows an organization to stage its collaborative business processes flexibly, globally, and inexpensively – enabling people to work together as- and whenneeded, constantly improving the company’s intelligence and capabilities.
Of course, for the intellectual capital created in these processes to be leveraged by the organization as a whole, the collaborative meetings in which it is elicited and elaborated must be a shareable resource. The value cannot be allowed to disappear when the meeting is over and people get up from their chairs. Knowledge developed collaboratively must be available for corporate-wide distribution and re-use. If valuable corporate knowledge resides only with individuals, then the knowledge is lost when these individuals leave the company. The company’s intellectual capital is reduced. Therefore, an essential component of the mission of organizations operating in a knowledge economy must be to translate tacit or implicit individual knowledge into explicit socially-held company knowledge. This context-rich knowledge must be easily accessible anywhere in an organization. This requires that online collaborative opportunities be integrated with work. Above all, it requires that collaborative technologies be able to both capture tacit knowledge in its collaborative context and also make this knowledge available widely within the enterprise.
Applying the requirement for a collaborative knowledge creation system to real business issues and decisions, a company can begin to solve knowledge problems in effective new ways, enriching its approach to many applications, including:
- Strategic Planning
- Sales Force Automation
- Human Resources
- Research & Development
- Best Practice Disciplines
- Market Research
- Market Intelligence
Introducing Caucus Events
Caucus Consortium has developed software and services that transpose an organization’s critical corporate meeting templates and conversation-based business processes into virtual events held at an online conference center. The Caucus platform is designed to address the problem, described in the introduction to this paper, of innovating business practices and improving products/services to keep pace with rapidly-shifting markets. Caucus events help “organizations… sharpen their ability to enhance, shape and focus corporate intelligence” by transforming expensive travel-to business meetings and conferences into convenient, flexible, and inexpensive-to-produce online experiences.
A Caucus conference center offers all the facilities of a world-class off-site conference center transposed onto the Web. Organizations deploy their valuable corporate business processes in Caucus events held at the center, and they are able to involve exactly the people required for optimum outcomes – independent of global location and schedule. The Caucus platform helps the enterprise develop and deliver effective collaborative knowledge-creation and knowledge-capture in a global context – to meet the requirements of the global knowledge economy.
Key Caucus Features/Benefits
Active Collaboration: Caucus events are modeled on real-world collaborative meeting places. The heart of the process consists of people actively working on problems together, talking through these problems in collaborative conversations. Participants and leaders hold topic-focused meetings and discussions – just as they would face-to-face. But, they hold these meetings and discussions online, in virtual conference rooms and other online meeting places. Just as in a real-world meeting, people share and shape information in Caucus, easily including or referring to files and other information within the active flow of the conversation. They express opinions and take in their colleagues’ reactions; they give presentations and distribute analyses, documents, etc. In this interactive process they help each other gain knowledge, and they build common knowledge among all those in the meeting.
Networked Knowledge Modules: Like a real-world meeting space, the virtual meeting spaces of Caucus are information-rich. They can hold all kinds of materials, including collections of documents or other corporate data (presentations, multimedia, database-access links, Web sites, selections from the collaborative meeting record, etc.) from an intranet or on the Web. Leaders and participants can add new materials any time during the learning application. Events can easily integrate access to document-management solutions, Lotus Notes databases, or any other information source that can be accessed via a Web browser.
Collaborative Relationships: Getting to know colleagues is essential to successful collaboration. Caucus makes this easy. Participants can quickly navigate information about colleagues to learn about their participation patterns. Participants always know what others have seen of the collaboration, what they’ve read of your own contributions, and more. Outside the core meeting spaces, participants can also meet online in Caucus commons rooms to become better acquainted, pursue common interests and strengthen their ability to work and learn together.
Shared Space & Common Knowledge: Caucus is quite literally a place – where people gather to exchange knowledge and build a body of knowledge, where new ideas germinate, where documents are shared, and where organizational knowledge and organizational culture grow. Collaborative knowledge-creation activities actually ‘live’ in this virtual space, as Caucus participants build and enhance a pool of common corporate knowledge.
This knowledge is not a database. Rather, like all knowledge, it is embodied in people – that is, it is living and in context. It is an active and growing collaborative knowledge base where important tacit and explicit understandings are shared, developed, and recorded in context.
People can work flexibly with this body of shared knowledge. The entire meeting, including all participants’ contributions and all information resources, is available for review at any time. A person can easily create a personal notebook in which they ‘slice and dice’ parts of the application’s collaborative content and informational resources, re-ordering the knowledge as required.
Anytime Anyplace Access: Caucus is always available. Participants collaborate without needing to be logged in at the same time. The user is presented with a typical Web site experience – convenient, browser-based, and always accessible. This is ideal for busy enterprise knowledge workers. They have demanding schedules, they are distributed around the globe, and they are on the go. Often, these are the employees with the greatest need for collaborative opportunities. Yet they find them difficult to schedule. Caucus makes it easy for these busy people to participate when they are best prepared and most able to focus. Working in Caucus, a participant has the opportunity to contribute thoughtfully, without the real-time pressure of ‘who talks fastest’ and ‘who has the loudest voice.’ As a result, a Caucus event exhibits a very high quality of participation, leading to excellent outcomes.
Customization: Caucus software is flexible and customizable. An organization can accommodate multiple groups and multiple collaborative learning programs easily. Each Caucus event or program can be given a unique look and feel to accommodate different groups and different learning programs. The information furnishings of a Caucus space vary just as such spaces vary in the real world – as a biology lab and a corporate conference room differ in the real world, so they will in Caucus.
Enhanced Corporate Knowledge: The knowledge recorded in Caucus is an enterprise knowledge asset. Caucus tools allow a company to gather the knowledge created in a Caucus event for re-use in the enterprise. These ‘knowledge harvests’ can be re-distributed and re-used elsewhere in the enterprise, or used as a starting point for further conversations and additional development.
Summary
Current business systems for knowledge management and intranet/Internet information sharing provide incomplete answers to companies’ growing need to create new company intelligence globally in collaborative meetings. In order to work together online, actively shaping data and information into collective knowledge that guides their action and forms their organizational culture, companies and their employees need systems that support virtual collaborative meetings online.
The Caucus Consortium has developed proprietary software and services to create collaborative events that address this problem. Caucus offers an advanced environment for communities of practice and action. It combines a best-of-breed online conference center facility with a flexible Web-based architecture allowing an organization to furnish its virtual collaboration centers with information from anywhere in the organization and to support a variety of collaboration applications in secure environments tailored to the groups and their purposes. Caucus offers a complete set of consulting and training services to assure that the Caucus events we create for organizations are successful.
Applications of Caucus result in improved decisions, increased knowledge and better distribution of knowledge, improved planning and development cycles, more functional and productive relationships within and among distributed teams, improved personnel productivity, increased company understanding of its internal and external environment and more effective and profitable company action.
Filed under: Business 2.0, Caucus Consortium, Caucus Systems, Collaborative Intelligence, Emergent Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Online Collaboration, Web 2.0
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