The Pursuit of Productivity
Harvard Business School professor Andy McAfee, a proponent of the widespread adoption of social media in the enterprise, has written an interesting article about the possible perception within large companies that the usage of wikis, blogs and other social media tools may label the authors as being a "goof-offs."
To me that is just ridiculous, but I can see it happening. If there isn't a clear vision behind what the social media tools should be used for within the company, the authors will not know what to write about and may in fact "goof off." However, if you have a clear and defined "story" as to why these tools are being introduced to the organization I can guarantee that dramatic differences will immediately be apparent.
For example, the story behind my development team's internal community is that we need a place for collaboration, documentation and persistent communication. This is a bit of a vague story, but it ends up translating into some very well defined uses. For example...
- Collaboration in wikis to generate requirement documents
- Conversation within discussion forums for decision making
- Creation of photo albums containing screen shots to gather UI feedback at an early stage in development
- Creation of videos to demonstrate the usage of features upon completion
These are just a few examples, but you can quickly see that authors creating content within our community will not be viewed as being "goof-offs." Instead, the creation of content has become a welcome part of the job and the team's productivity has increased tremendously by always having valuable information just a few clicks away.
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