McAfee on Widening the Flow

HBS's Andrew McAfee recently blogged on "widening the flow". Building on my distinction between in-the-flow and above-the-flow, McAfee argues eloquently that the organizational benefit of Enterprise 2.0 depends largely on organizations bringing more of their content-rich activity into the flow.

One conclusion I take away from Michael’s insight is that business leaders, if they’re serious about Enterprise 2.0, should think of ways to put contributions in the flow, as opposed to above it

McAfee's making a really important point here. In the old world of emails and knowledge management systems, our tools and processes force a rigid distinction between "doing your job" (i.e., in-the-flow activities, usually in email) and "giving back to the organization" (above-the-flow contributions to a knowledge management system). That framing of the issue ensures that people will spend  almost all their time in email and very little time contributing knowledge--hence the "culture and incentives" problem that has bedeviled Knowledge Management since the very start.

What excites McAfee (and me) about Enterprise 2.0 tools is that, when used well, they blur almost beyond recognition the line between in-the-flow and above-the-flow. In-the-flow wikis help teams (and sometimes even individuals) do their daily work better and faster. They simultaneously create--almost as a by-product--and enduring, searchable, assets which is tremendously useful for the rest of the organization to find experts, connect colleagues working on related issues, reuse documents, train new hires, etc.

It's sort of like those late-night commercials for kitchen gadgets. "If you use the wiki for in-the-flow group collaboration, we'll throw in a fully populated knowledge repository...absolutely free!"

Suddenly culture and incentives don't seem so problematic.

Comments

[Jason]

Michael,

I think you and Andrew are absolutely correct. The thing I would add is that new Enterprise 2.0 solutions need to address how people have worked historically and account for habits and current tools. For example, you mention that email is "old world." I couldn't agree more. However, it is the lowest common denominator and difficult to supplant. I work for a company that addressed this issue by adding email into the collaboration flow (GroupSwim). When someone has content or knowledge that should be added into the collaboration tool, they simply email the community or add the community to an ongoing email thread. When the email goes into GroupSwim, the sofware analyzes the semantics of the message and automatically assigns tags to it for easy search and connection with other related content. I blogged on this strategy as well (http://blog.groupswim.com/2008/01/22/why-any-collaboration-strategy-must-include-email/). We went back and forth on whether to add this feature or not, but our customers eventually forced us and we are glad they did.

Jason

[Michael Idinopulos]

Jason, I agree. The Socialtext wiki (www.socialtext.com) supports emailing into the wiki, and we have many customers for whom this is the killer app.