Eugene Eric Kim has been producing a lot of interesting content on his blog “EEK Speaks”. His run down of Socialtext 2.0 is great, and so is his post about a CIA sponsored workshop to discuss the subject of blogging and wikis. Excerpt:

“Many of the ideas centered around ways to encourage blogging or Wikis, but most of these were misguided. I think rewarding people for using a tool is generally a bad idea. What you want to do is reward people for collaborating.”

Introducing this style of collaboration to large organizations is on the verge of becoming a hot business topic. I’ve had some experience with it recently with large and small organizations, and the results have been encouraging.

Eugene is right with his assessment that cultural changes play a greater role than technological changes. People have a very easy time learning to use blogs and wikis. The broader and more relevant challenge for organizations is to help people understand the value of blogs and wikis, and therefore want to use them.

Plan Resonate was hired to develop an internal blogging system for SAP early this year. It has been a fun project and was a great opportunity to collaborate with Jeff Nolan, then director of SAP’s Apollo Strategy group. The story of how SAP developed and has been using the tool could shed light on how other large scale hierarchical organizations can adopt a culture of collaboration. Working on that project is an ongoing process and when time permits I’ll share some of the more interesting details of what we’ve been doing.
[tags]Eugene Eric Kim, collaboration, culture[/tags]