Social Computing in the Enterprise:

Controlling the Creative Beast

Written by:

Leigh Klotz, Senior Software Architect

Xerox DocuShare Business Unit

White Paper

August 2006

Xerox DocuShare

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Social Computing in the Enterprise:

Controlling the Creative Beast

As organizations continually seek new ways to increase efficiencies

among dispersed teams, social computing tools, such as Weblogs

(blogs) and wikis, are moving beyond the public domain to permeate the

workplace. A recent survey of IT decision-makers from IDC indicates that

more than 40 percent of the organizations polled were already using blogs

internally for corporate use.

These tools serve as organizing hubs for workgroups to share and

disseminate information. For example, engineers are using blogs to

communicate product release notes and progress to stakeholders

and senior staff. Marketing teams use them to announce upcoming

promotional campaigns or new versions of products and new features to

their internal divisions, while corporate communications teams often use

blogs to make announcements to employees.

For some time, blogs have been associated with an underground image

as the technology allows users a certain social equality on the Internet.

From the corporate perspective it begs the question: does allowing blogs

in-house mean literally opening the door to anarchy in your department?

The best and wisest approach is for companies to find ways to harness

the power of this technology so that they can use the latest “cool” tools

and gain the benefits of promoting social networking. This requires

the ability to manage and store organizational mind share without

jeopardizing corporate reputation, encouraging inappropriate discussion,

or risking exposure of confidential information.

While the technology is being widely adopted in some progressive

organizations, the majority of businesses have yet to incorporate

social computing tools into their processes. For many, the thought of

using blogs and wikis for corporate use can be daunting, raising many

questions:

What is the best way to get started?

How can we ensure the information stored in wikis and blogs is

captured for reuse and saved as corporate knowledge?

Is there any hope of controlling a technology that is known for its

freedom of expression and lack of corporate control?

IDC, “The Future for Content Applications: A Survey of Market Readiness and

Technology Trends,” by Melissa Webster and Geoffrey Bock. IDC report # 3483 ,

Vol. , Feb. 2006.

“Forty percent of

organizations

are already using

blogs internally for

corporate use.”

– IDC 2006

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Delving into social computing

For those just getting started, it is best to begin using this technology for

a specific project or within a defined workgroup. By starting with a small

project, businesses can determine the policies and controls that are most

appropriate before rolling these tools out enterprise-wide.

Policies are necessary to help control the technology. However, it is

important not to be too restrictive to ensure the tools can be adapted

to fit the needs of the various employees and workgroups within the

organization. Also, be sure to select a solution to manage the blogs and

wikis that is easy to use. Employees will adopt the technology only if it is

straightforward and helps them work and communicate more efficiently.

If these criteria are met, users can rapidly see how blogs and wikis

can speed and simplify processes – increasing interest in adopting the

technology for wider use. When the time is right for an enterprise-wide

rollout, encourage, rather than mandate, employees to use the technology

and highlight the success of the initial implementation to their co-workers.

In order to use the tools effectively, companies must first understand the

purposes of and differences between blogs and wikis:

Wikis are built by communities to collect ideas in one central place.

Blogs help build communities through posts about one main idea.

According to the Wikipedia Web site, a wiki (which can stand for “

hat

I K

now

s”) is a type of Web site that allows users to add, remove,

or otherwise edit and change most content very quickly and easily,

sometimes without the need for registration. Blogs are said to build

communities because they provide a place where people can share

ideas. This suggests that a corporate best practice would be to use wikis

for brainstorming, refining ideas and plans, and blogs for more general

networking and information sharing.

Managing the technology

Social computing requires tools to capture, control and manage group

interactions.

The following features are essential for software used to manage blogs

and wikis within an organization and will help ensure the technology

is used appropriately for information sharing and streamlining internal

business processes:

User access permissions

– Organizations should designate a

corporate or workgroup system administrator or moderator to control

user access to team blogs. Those granted access can read, post, and

provide comments to the blog with the assurance that unwanted

participants or lurkers cannot access their information.

“Unleash the collective

and improvisational

genius of the

enterprise by

weaving together

people, documents

and action with social

software. The key

is how to make it

enterprise-ready.”

- John Seely Brown, Author of

“The Social Life of Information”

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Moderator approval and routing

– The moderator should have the

capability to review incoming posts to the blog in order to approve or

reject comments based on the appropriateness to the audience and

corporate policy.

Version and history storage

– To protect the organization from any

unforeseen legal issues, it is necessary to hold records of the various

versions and topics of conversation. Similar to records management

solutions, users and administrators should be able to store original

postings along with additional comments and version changes.

Auditing and tracking

– After storing the blog and wiki content, users

and administrators should be able to quickly locate specific records

by author or by date and time to quickly find the information needed.

It is also helpful for moderated blogs to be flagged automatically

for approval in a moderator’s listing so he or she can review them

quickly, and for a moderator to be able to track past approvals. As

blogs and wikis grow in use, it will become increasingly important to

track them for compliance. For example, if a manager starts sharing

internal data in a regularly updated blog, it may be necessary to track

versions later, possibly even for auditing.

Tagged content for search capabilities

– Using XML technology

to tag content enables users to search for and find information in

wikis and blogs that can be reused in other business situations,

ostensibly helping to increase the consistency of documents or

communications.

Xerox DocuShare CPX is an example of a solution that allows

organizations to leverage a content and process management

environment to control content created within wikis and blogs. Designed

to enable simple automation of document-centric business processes,

DocuShare CPX offers a full spectrum of document library features such

as access permissions, versioning, tracking, and auditing to support policy

Forum appropriate postings can be

reviewed, accepted, and posted or rejected

by the moderator.

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and control of all types of content. DocuShare CPX further supports the

secure access, monitoring, restricted contribution, review, and approval

of individual wiki pages or blog entries. This kind of solution offers

significant benefit by making control of wiki and blog content as simple as

assigning access permissions and moderator duties.

When used properly, blogs and wikis have the power to collect latent

knowledge in the organization and make it explicit. This shared

information can help businesses gain a competitive advantage by fueling

innovation, integrating ideas, and speeding business decisions.

About Xerox DocuShare

Addressing both the basic and complex requirements of Enterprise

Content Management (ECM), the Xerox DocuShare family of products

offers an innovative solution: two focused ECM applications built on one

common platform. Xerox DocuShare enables document management

collaboration, review and approval, and Web publishing to support

information sharing at all points in the enterprise by every knowledge

worker. Xerox DocuShare CPX offers the advanced ECM functionality

required for integrating and automating content, sophisticated

collaboration, and business process management around specifi c

operational tasks. And all Xerox DocuShare products are built on the

DocuShare Enterprise Content Platform, recognized for its ease of

installation, administration, and use. This shared platform simplifi

es deployments and reduces IT complexity, despite the typically

heterogeneous mix of databases, servers, directory services, and storage

systems found in today’s enterprise.

Xerox DocuShare Business Unit

3400 Hillview Avenue

Palo Alto, California 94304

USA

(800) 735-7749

material and information now allowed by statutory or judicial law or hereinafter granted.

Xerox and DocuShare are registered trademarks identifying products of Xerox Corporation. All other products are trademarks of

their respective companies.

Leigh L. Klotz, Jr. is a senior software architect with Xerox DocuShare and was

editor of the World Wide Web Consortium XForms .0 Recommendation. He has

been active in document capture, user interface, and document management

projects at Fuji Xerox, PARC, and Xerox Corporation.

“Companies who

haven’t already

developed a clear

policy on employee

blogging will soon

have to.”

- Frank Gilbane, CEO

Gilbane Group Inc.