Huh? It’s true. Email works.

It’s easy, there are few compatibility issues, and it does have some ways of governing access control.

Anne Zelenka, (AKA Anne 2.0) has an interesting post entitled Email: The Good Enough Collaboration Tool. I think she is right.

Email is a critical enterprise tool, and it isn’t likely to go away. So how is email likely to be a key to helping Enterprise 2.0 take off?

The Enterprise 2.0 Communication Continuum

First, it is important to realize that blogs and wikis are just new communication tools. They are powerful communication tools, but they are not all that different from existing tools, such as the phone, email and instant messaging (IM). Big companies will want to use blogs and wikis precisely because they are powerful communication tools. Blogs and wikis sit on what can be thought of as a communication continuum that also includes the phone, email and IM.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these electronic communication tools.

Immediate - But not Leveragable

The phone is highly personal, and facilitates immediate communication.

However, phone calls are generally designed and used for one to one communication.

It is possible to use a conference call to facilitate one to many or many to many communication, but there are limitations to its usefulness. Further, phone calls are not searchable, and taggable.

Few companies use recorded phone calls as a store of institutional knowledge. Traders might keep a tape for contract disputes, but most business decisions are not backed up as recorded phone conversations. Thus, while immediate, phone calls are not highly leveragable.

Instant messaging and email are slightly more leveragable than phone calls. You can search your own email, and forward email to a large group. However, anti-spamming technology, and business social conventions prevent you for sending to the whole company, for example. Few people who work for companies of more than 5,000 regularly email the entire company.

In addition, while you can search your own email, generally, most employees can’t also search their colleagues’ email. Thus, IM and email, while immediate, are not highly leveragable.

Put another way, it is hard to leverage the knowledge within an email for the benefit of the entire organization.

Easily Leveraged - Not So Immediate

Blogs and wikis are at the other end of the spectrum. Both are highly leverageable. For example, employees can

1. Search across multiple blog and wiki posts
2. Tag articles as part of a social bookmarking system
3. Subscribe to a blog feed
4. Link to articles to for several reasons:

• Link to highlight information (this cool)
• Link to put information in a different context (this could also be used to…)
• Link to extend a conversation with agreement or disagreement
• Link as part of a chain of reasoning (this was my source for…)

Enterprise blogs can also be aggregated in interesting ways. For example, if someone writes an article in a Project Blog that is generally useful, they can tag it as a best practice. A good enterprise class blogging system, such as iUpload, can be set up to automatically aggregate all articles labeled as a best practice into a central Best Practices blog.

The information in blogs and wikis can also be easily reformatted into structured business data. For example, with the simple addition of a single template, employee People Pages can be rewritten in an XML format that be used as a feed for an HR system, or even as the source data for kind of replacement.

Business Reasons to Use Blogs & Wikis within the Enterprise

If you are a CTO, CIO or CKO, here are some of the reasons why you will want to get blog and wiki technology into you company as quickly as possible:

1) Positive Externalities - blogs and wikis capture information from existing work flows

If you set up simple types of blogs such as People Pages, Project Work Sites and Client Work Sites within your enterprise, you will be able to capture institutional knowledge from preexisting work flows. Business focused blogs do not look like external blogs. Instead, people use blogging software to help them get work done. On a Project Work Site, people communicate about the project, using widgets to keep track of deadlines, using comments to facilitate discussion, and using update posts to keep everyone informed of the latest project developments.

Because blogs and wikis are easily leveraged, nothing more needs to be done to create a platform where the whole company can benefit from the lessons learned and the insights developed during the course of the project. Instead lost in emails, the information is there, ready to be searched, linked to, and tagged.

2) Increase the Pace of Internal Innovation

For those who are long time readers of this blog, please forgive me for repeating myself a bit here.

In today’s globally competitive business environment, the only way to generate a constant stream of above average profits is to generate a constant stream of innovations. To generate a constant stream of innovations, you need to empower the people can come up with all those innovations for you. To do that, you need to take your knowledge workers and turn them into innovation creators. You do this by augmenting existing communication tools with additional powerful tools.

What are these tools supposed to do?

Just think of the problem from the perspective of a bright young employee who has come up with a million dollar idea. How is this junior person supposed to work through your company’s bureaucracy to hone the idea, make the business case, and turn the idea into reality? How are they supposed to build the support needed to fight through the inevitable opposition to change that prevents innovation within most organizations? Remember that people who succeed in most organizations have good political skills, and not necessarily good ideas. If you are a CEO who wants to encourage innovation, you will want to make sure that good ideas bubble up regardless of the source.

So, what do innovation creators need?

1. Innovation creators need to know who is who: This problem plays itself out in most large organizations. Solving the tactical problem of “who is who” is critical to creating an environment that generates innovation.
2. Innovation creators need to know what is going on: Helping people know the big picture, the small details and preventing repeat research are critical tactical steps.
3. Innovation creators need to own a piece of the pie: Giving every member of your team control over group communication and knowledge transference tools is one of the best ways to create an environment where employees feel ownership.
4. An environment of reciprocal altruism: Giving every member of your team access to tools that publicly display their contributions to the group effort is one of the best ways to create an environment that supports reciprocal altruism.
5. Innovation creators thrive in an environment that encourages dialogue: In order for an organization to be truly innovative and exhibit emergent intelligence, it must have a system that facilitates feedback.

Blogs and wikis help disseminate information efficiently through out an entire organization.

Someone with a good idea can write about on an appropriate internal blog. The blog provides the platform for giving good ideas much needed attention.

And if you simply give people a by line for every article they write, they know that they will get credit for contributing good ideas.

That credit can be simple positive recognition from their peers.

People show up in the morning because they are paid to. They work hard when they are recognized for their efforts.

Setting up the right structure with blogs and wikis will create an environment that generates innovation.

For more details, check out my paper entitled: Turing Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators

3) Create a platform that can be used to produce better ad-hoc work flows

Using blogs and wikis to get work done should not be compared to the use of large highly customized purpose specific systems, such as General Ledgers, ERP systems and CRM systems.

Instead, business blogs and wikis should be compared to the kinds of manual processes they replace.

As I mentioned in a previous article, 40% of business processes are ad hoc. That means that 40% of business processes involve people using MS Word, Excel, email and the phone. Today’s business processes are missing key elements including:

• Access control
• Audit trails of who changed what
• Versioning
• Structured feed back mechanisms that both facilitate feed back and record the decisions made
• simple ways of distributing information to a large group

Blogs and wikis can be used to solve all of these problems while simultaneously giving end users the power and flexibility needed to build ad hoc processes needed in today’s every changing business environment.

Email Will Help Propel Adoption of Enterprise 2.0

So, how is it that Email will help usher in this new era of powerful web enabled productivity tools?

Simple. Blogs can have email addresses. If you are working on a project, and feel that the email you are writing will be useful to the whole team, or even to a broader audience, don’t cc 5,000 people just in case they might want to know.

Instead, cc the project blog. It really is as easy as that.

Why is this so important? Transitioning to a new technology within a large work force is never easy. Adoption will take time.

While the popularity of blogs are growing exponentially at the moment, only 5% of all people on line current have a blog, although I project it to be more than 50% by June, 2008. In the US, according to Pew, the rate is slightly higher, with 8% of people currently write a personal blog. That same study says that 39% of Americans read blogs.

As this technology takes hold within the enterprise, it is critical for your success that you take into account ever type of end user within your organization.

Not all end users will be comfortable using a web based input screen. For those users who are not, it is important to give them as many familiar options as possible.

Some people will prefer to continue using email.

Others will be happy using a desk-top blog authoring tool like Windows Live Writer or Ecto.