I have to admit that I’m a bit of a collaboration and community junkie and as such follow some obscure topics.  One topic I’ve had on my radar for quite some time is Flock Theory.  Flock theory tries to describe the self-organizing and emergent aspects of human behavior.  Succinctly put, behavior in some cases is not a property of any individual person (or bird), but rather emerges as a property of a group or social network (flock).  This concept can be used to describe aspects of both collaborative teams and open source communities.  I’m don’t want to analyze the merits of the theory but I do want to introduce its concepts which I think have implications for team/community productivity and possibility even individual information relevance. (more…)

No tags Hide

Team collaboration and social networking software are all the buzz right now, however we need to look at the overall contribution these technologies bring to the enterprise in terms of value before we determine if they should be the new “cool” technology.  Are IT programmers ready to answer the CIO’s question of “How will team collaboration software add value to our business?”?  Maybe?  Maybe not?  What I hope to describe is how you can answer that question and what to look for in order to get your company started using collaboration software to solve real business problems.

Which leads us to our first real question we need to answer and that is – how does collaboration add value to the bottom line of a business?  (more…)

No tags Hide