Eric Mack On-Line

We spend much time today on Many-to-Many collaboration. One-to-One collaboration works via email, phone, and IM, but the group aspect is the greater challenge and opportunity.

Expediting innovation:

What does it take to drive innovation?
The technology is only as good as the people and processes around it. So, let's look at the soft stuff.

Got group intelligence?
Speaker theme, "Personal Productivity is yesterday" (ouch! Sorry David.) Let's see where he goes with this theme...

Collaboration doesn't work/Not all collaboration is equal
Ad-hoc collaboration (often 1:1) Socializing, testing ideas, transaction (2 peers) with notification and discussion.
Structured group collaboration: lecturing (1 to many), teaching/peer reviews/"push"
Exploration & Innovation (m2m)

Many to many paradox: It's where real teamwork/innovation happens in processes but it's hard work.

Trust is required
A supportive culture is required
Confident Leadership is required

Silos are power but don't contribute to innovation.

Professor Alex Pentland of MIT Media lab is up next:

The most important communication is face to face. You can't manage what you can't measure.

Pentland is using smart badges (name tags with sensors) to measure how much time people spend face to face, to see who talks to whom. The opportunity is to map knowledge networks to see different parts of the business process and the knowledge transfers that ensue.

His conclusion: email and face-to-face communication are anti-correlation.

Model:

Personal productivity r=0.33 (see slide) had to do with face-to-face interaction. interesting. (too much info coming to catch); see slides)

Up next: David Marshak, IBM
How do you easily capture the knowledge of 300,000 workers?
Avg IBM exec spends 400 min in audio meetings.

Community tools discussion (think of KM communities of practice/interest)
Handles via IBM';s blue pages. Long tail effect here as we have thousands of very small communities of interest.
Shared story of problem solving via harnessing community knowledge. (I assume SameTime was involved, but no product pitch made)
OK, I was right. SameTime example showing learning innovations achieved via group broadcast.
David gave us a fascinating demonstration/overview of how IBM is using smart tools to facilitate effective meetings.

Third speaker is up. John Abele, from Boston Scientific. (verify)

Impediments to collaboration:
(Listen to tape and see Michael's blog on this: )  Key take away is that one reason collaboration is broken is that we reward the wrong behaviors.

Conclusion, we need to revisit how we collaborate for knowledge transfer.