Chris Writes.

After a few great years with Gerolsteiner, we’ve just signed Quickstep-Innergetic for 2007.  That’s pretty cool.  Should be interesting to see the effects of having a team with roots in Belgium, and a roster that includes the current world champion from Italy, plus the globally popular charisma guy Tom Boonen.  I can’t wait for the early season races.

Office 2.0 applications, in many cases, seek to reduce shift the tacit interactions we rely on (claim was 41% of our interactions are tacit, relying on phone, IM, email, memos, Post-its, smoke signals, etc).  The shift they implied here was that we have an opportunity to make more of these tacit interactions feel more like personal interactions through wikis, blogs, and web2.0-based collaborations.  Irrespective of whether or not these interactions are still actually tacit, they do feel more inclusive and conversational.   Blogs and wikis can, in many cases, replace the need for these tacit interactions, while adding the benefits (or hazards, I suppose) turning this information into searchable documentation, and adding individual attribution.

It took a lot of listening at this conference to distill the following:

Within the scope of collaboration, I’ve heard various iterations of 3 general rules about blogs and wikis. But most critical, understand that collaboration doesn’t happen without participation, so focus early efforts on improving participation.

1. 1. No matter how many people are involved, lots or few, someone must be responsible for the blog or wiki. This isn’t dictatorship, but rather, just maintenance and direction on taxonomy, style, and focus. One person must be responsible. One person. One. Get it?
2. 2. Wikis are “owned” by a team or group that includes anyone who’s submitted or even only read and chosen not to change. They still offer authorship credit, so individuals are still applaudable/accountable. Wikis are generally well suited to content that can be improved over time (think project plans, translations, )
3. 3. Blogs are far more personalized and perceived as being a vessel for a collection of personal opinions, both the authors and the readers/commenters. Blogs are ideal for content that gets less relevant over time (like personal journals, expert advice on a specific topic, daily news)

Adoption tricks

1. 1. Leave obvious errrrors in wikis, and then let people fix them. They’ll immediately see how it works.
2. 2. Corporate blogs can grow fast if you hold content contests. Ask for anything, and then let the good stuff bubble up. And let the good stuff be determined by the users.
3. 3. Find the connectors and experts in your office and get them involved. Think of the people that have networks within the company, and who are often consulted voluntarily.

So I’m attending this conference in San Francisco, which started yesterday.  I’m attending for a simple reason: finding tech apps that will assist and improve collaboration.  One of the first speakers yesterday was Andrew McAfee, an HBS professor who teaches IT courses to biz folks.  He said a few things that resonated with me:

Users are three things: Social, busy, and biased.

This bias manifests itself in what he calls the 9x effect: people overvalue what they have by a factor of 3, and undervalue new stuff by a factor of 3.  So something needs to be 10x better than what you have to overcome the overbias of what you have, and the underbias of the new thing.  When we began using CELUM Imagine to manage our digital files, it was infinity-times better than what we had because we had (essentially) nothing.  In the case of sharing spreadsheets or other office documents, I think we’re still a bit far away from 10x improvements over what we currently have (emailing files between one another, and/or shared network drives).  But the guys at Zoho and the new office apps from Google are getting darn close.