Our work was mainly divided into 3 phases:

• The first step was a study of opportunity, around 3 axes: the vision at 10 years of the evolution of the office and collaborative ; the business impacts in terms of usage transformations for the employees; the losses or gains expected in terms of overall productivity for the company. The study, conducted in parallel with other actions concerning the choice of the solution (between Microsoft, IBM and Google), have resulted in the final choice of the Google Apps by the large-account.
• The second step was to accompany a first Google Apps pilot for 3 months to assess the usage transformations on a smaller sample and evaluate actions for a massive deployment. The pilot quickly hired hundreds of people and has been quickly adopted by users.
• The third step is the final deployment to all employees, which is in a phased path depending on different products, takeovers of existing, technical and organizational measures. Google Docs & Sites may for example be immediately deployed to all employees, but GMail and Google Calendar require a more gradual deployment to cover existing data imports from older systems.

The feedback is extremely rich. The first interesting point is the ease with which users adopt the solution as soon as their profits are introduced and demonstrated. Of course 100% of the needs formerly covered by Microsoft Office for example cannot be by Google Apps (complex Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint Slideshow filled with animations), but in fact we realize very quickly that:

1. users are demanding the simplicity and ease of use in the information production and exchange with their colleagues. Once they understand that Google Docs for example offers these two dimensions instantly, they are ready to sacrifice some advanced uses of existing products to get the benefits of Google.
2. At least 90% of normal daily use of an employee are covered by Google Apps. We can even say that 100% of the usages of a vast majority of users are covered by Google Apps. Only what we can call “power users” will need in some cases advanced features of Excel or PowerPoint (Word we put it in another category, because it is 99% very quickly replaced by direct online wiki or doc production). In this case we retain versions of MS Office for these people and uses it, which drastically reduces the need of licenses (one Google Apps licence costs 10 times less).

Unlike many ideas in this area, consisting generally to say that Google Apps is suited to small businesses but not to large accounts, this implementation proves in one hand our own studies in this subject (solutions like Google are the future of the office and collaborative areas) and in the other hand also confirms that Google Apps is perfectly usable for large-account, at very large scale, in place of Microsoft Office and any other collaborative solution.

There is one initial condition: having previously determined the necesary usage transformations to perform in the company from the old to the new paradigm, and implemented an adoption policy that allows the deployment for employees with the most ease possible while enjoying the characteristics of viral adoption of such a product.

The benefits are to go, not in terms of “better knowledge management”, “increased ability to innovate,” or any other qualitative argument difficult to quantify in the short term, but in terms of individual and collective productivity gains. Because in the end, and it is the credo that Kimind defends since its inception through the expertise of its consultants, it is at the level of the daily work productivity that the challenge of adopting these new tools is.

By simplifying the usage of new tools, promoting mass collaboration and instantaneous collaboration between employees (and beyond with immediate sharing with partners, customers or suppliers), it is the individual, group and enterprise level which improve their overall work processes, break the barriers accumulated over the years and disrupt bottlenecks that overfilled e-mailboxes and files servers have become.

It is extremely easy thanks to field interview conducted by Kimind’s consultants to make understand the protagonists themselves how much huge savings in time they will perform throughout the process transformation of informal workflows. Not only saving time but also the ability to perform tasks previously impossible because of the lack of real collaboration tools.

Therefore, a true usage transformation is happening, which induces a transformation of the organization and which must therefore be engaged by the top management to be quickly adopted.

Google Apps is currently the only solution focusing on such approach and delivering thses gains in productivity on a global scale of a large-account. No other solution offers a broad spectrum of functionalalities, even if they cover better small parts of this set.

But large accounts need a global solution, and Google Apps is so far the only operational alternative, which was demonstrated by the massive deployment and feedback. Other players like Microsoft and IBM will of course change it underway, but the transformation of their own architectures and minds are extremely slow throughout the evolution of these solutions, and the delays are significant.

In conclusion, Google Apps is perfectly adapted to the use of a large account, the problem is more on the ability for this large account to transform the usages and to realize that it can and must do so to unleash new levels of productivity.

I explain why our companies must move as quickly as possible to this new step, necessary to simply exceed the limits where are stuck their current organizations.

Without adopting the concepts of Enterprise 2.0 as soon as possible, our organizations will be unable to present a new quantum leap in terms of individual and collective productivity, because traditional information systems, and the organizations and management methods being associated become brakes, even a disorganization factor in many cases.

Only a real disruption in the organisation, that of the Enterprise 2.0, allow today to restore rationality and optimization in the daily work of individuals and teams for their benefit and that of enterprises.

(the lecture had been filmed, the video arrives in a few days with more details on my words)

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Technorati tags: Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Collaboration, Participation, Productivity, Disruption

Slide 2: 20 years of evolutionConsulting Kimind in CWE Kimind Consulting massive adoption Informational Dimension Heterarchical Web 2.0 (Participatory) Real Time Organizational Dimension Wikis Blogs Kimind Quadrant Web-based workspaces Traditional Collaborative Solutions (Lotus, Microsoft, …) Hierarchical Structured Unstructured © 2006-2008, Miguel Membrado – Kimind Consulting low adoption (knowledge)

Slide 3: Towards Enterprise 2.0 Kimind Consulting Kimind Consulting What is Enterprise 2.0  Evolution in organization, management and methodologies  8 technical pillars: wiki + blog + search + social bookmarking +  customized home pages + RSS + social networks For which benefits  Individual and collective productivity growth  Better: competitiveness and innovation ; collective intelligence ;  talent and customer loyalty Five Key concepts  The end of the e-mail/file era  Participation Age  Simplicity  Extended Organizations  Radical transparency 

Slide 4: A Disruption in the Daily Work Kimind Consulting Kimind Consulting e-Mail Internet Explorer MSOffice Local and Shared Files Traditional Daily Work Organization Inter-personal collaboration ; disorganization ; saturation ; waste ; redundancy ; information loss ; inefficiency ; complexity ; high costs ; … HOW TO BE MORE PRODUCTIVE? WE HAVE REACHED A LIMIT! IMPOSSIBLE TO GO BEYOND WITHOUT A DISRUPTION… FireFox (open source) RSS Feeds Online Office Wiki Webmail/Chat Blog New Daily Work Organization rationalization ; organization ; team collaboration ; information repositories ; accumulation ; productivity ; simplicity ; low costs ; remote working ; …

Slide 5: Rationalization & Kimind Consulting Optimization Kimind Consulting BEFORE: Production+ e-Mail + attachments MS Office Local & Shared Files Communication+ Storage AFTER: Collaborative Production Wiki Interactive Communication Blog Collaborative Watch Social Bookmarking Collaborative Office Automation Online Office Information Consumption Customized Home Pages RSS Feeds & Monitoring Interpersonal Communication & alerts Webmail + Chat Socialization + social directories Enterprise Social Networks

Slide 6: HOW TO EVOLVE Kimind Consulting Kimind Consulting Informational Dimension Heterarchical (Participatory) Management Evolution Organizational Dimension Your organization tomorrow Kimind Quadrant IS Evolution Your organization today Hierarchical Structured Unstructured © 2006-2008, Miguel Membrado – Kimind (knowledge)

Slide 7: Conclusion Kimind Consulting Kimind Consulting A new step in terms of individual and collective  productivity is now possible By adopting Web 2.0 new usages for the Enterprise  Corporation Feedbacks from large accounts  exist for a few years The end of Microsoft supremacy on the desktop  Don’t be late to evolve  The change must be done TODAY…  … because there is a learning curve  … because your competitors will do it also 

The answer is NO! The most used collaborative tool is still the electronic messaging system. Why? Because e-mail is an unstructured way to send and share information; an immediate and effortless system. When you enable people and teams to work with powerful collaborative tools, you notice that it takes time for them to consider these tools as part of their daily work.

The reason is the length of the adoption curve, because it takes time to change working habits to work in a more structured and disciplined way. If the company is well organized and its processes well defined, documented and managed, the adoption of the collaboration tools will be easier and faster because they will drive and support the processes.

But, this is not the most common case. A majority of corporations and SMEs are not that well organized and a huge number of employees are still working with a lot of informal knowledge. To force those employees to structure this informal knowledge through a collaborative tool is a difficult challenge.

This problem doesn’t exist with synchronous collaborative tools, because they are based on a real-time communication and there is no need to structure anything. But even those tools are not widely spread in corporations. This lack of usage of synchronous tools will be solved with a pragmatic approach by the hierarchy when it will be obvious that security issues can be managed and that productivity is really higher using these tools.

However solving the asynchronous tool adoption problem will be much more difficult, and what follows shows why it is so important to change our way of thinking about collaboration, because this topic could be one of the next most important corporate organisational changes in the coming years.

Do Collaboration Tools Have Improved Corporate Organizations?

An established fact now is that even in most of the companies using collaborative tools the organization has not changed. It should be obvious that introducing such tools in companies should result in major organisational changes. Why? Because those tools allow people to be more interconnected, to capitalize information, to work transversally instead of vertically, to need less hierarchy in their management, in other words to be more efficient, more productive and more creative. But it is not the case.

As research shows us, the major issue is that these collaboration tools have been matching the rules of the existing organizations, not the reverse. In fact, collaborative tools are used as suppliers, facilitators in some cases, but not as disruptive tools changing radically the behaviour of people. They are just enablers.

On the opposite, the most unique recent experience is the emergence of the Web 2.0 paradigm with the birth of a generation of new participative tools and the creation of huge social communities and user-generated contents. The blogosphere has grown from nothing in 2001 to more than 70 million of blogs in 2006, doubling each six months up to now. Social networks like mySpace have reached the 100 million users in 3 years, and user-generated content web sites like YouTube reached 100 million videos streamed daily in less than 2 years! It is not possible to stay quiet in front of this phenomenon. Is it a pure consumer change or will it affect also the companies? Why these participative tools have such a great impact and not the collaborative ones?

It seems that the Web 2.0 wave has woken up a “deep human longing for individuals to participate and make their voices heard” (Thomas Friedman, The world is Flat, 2006). People want to participate, to be involved, and to take part of. It is the reason why blogs, wikis, and all user-generated content web sites are so successful.

Participation versus Collaboration

What is the real difference between participation and collaboration? Collaborate is “to work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort; to work together toward a common end” (Webster); Participate is “to take part” (Webster) or “to join in, to take part, to involve oneself” (Wiktionary); What it means is that participation action doesn’t need a “work together” action, only a personal involvement in a global action. It is easier for most people. “Working together” can be done without reflecting upon the nature of work, while participating induces involvement, and it is what people want, to be involved in the decision, to take part of them, even if they are not fully collaborating to achieve the work.

Blogs are the best example of this new participation era. The origin of blog is egocentric: it is the ability for a human being to publish his own thoughts to be read by his family, his friends, and perhaps some other unknown internet users. Thanks to the possibility of commenting and “trackbacking” on the other bloggers’ posts, a huge network of links has been created day after day: the most important ones are not the URL links but the human links created between all bloggers thanks to these two trivial mechanisms. Step by step, a collective intelligence has emerged from this pile of blogs, without any real collaboration, just through a self-organization of active participation! Consequence is that world is changing, not thanks to the collaborative technologies, but thanks to the participative ones that have unleashed the human will to be actively involved in his environment.

Consequences for institutions and hierarchies are huge. For institutions, it is the emergence of the “democracy 2.0″ concept, a participative democracy, where the citizen will be involved in the political decisions at a level never reached until now. For hierarchies, it is the end of hierarchical management in companies, because nobody will suffer anymore not to use in their own company the tools that everybody is using so efficiently in their private life. Even if the company’s managers don’t want to introduce these participative technologies inside their companies, the pressure from their employees will be so strong that no one will hold this wave.

Participation, a Disruptive Change for the Organization

The situation is critical for the organization, because for the first time, the consumer world is ahead in terms of new usages. Participative tools, even collaborative ones are used daily by millions of people in their private life, changing their habits and their way to see the world and interact. The new generations, still in college or universities, have grown up with these tools, which is not the case for their parents who are today the companies’ employees.

It is a disruptive change for the companies. Collaboration tools haven’t succeeded in changing organizations and mindsets, because these tools are only facilitating current work and matching current organizations, even if a small percentage of advanced users take profit from these new tools to change their way of working (e-working, e-organizations). If it is impossible for most users to be fully involved in all the company’s collaborative processes, participative tools give the technical infrastructure to allow all company’s employees to be really involved, each of them at their own level, in the small or big decisions where they can have something to say. Like in the blogosphere, if the company is able to manage this new organization, a collective intelligence will be self-generated, increasing the efficiency, the productivity and the creativity of each individual, team and finally the whole company.

Participative technologies are for everybody: each employee can use them, publish, comment, interact, share, exchange, validate, interrogate, freely, without any constraint, just following the good usage rules and conventions decided by the company. It is the reason why today the most important thing to do for a company is to implement immediately participative technologies, at least blogs and wikis, in all their departments, with all their teams, allowing people to express themselves, to interact through comments, to start building participative interactions and create step by step a participative ecosystem. This way, it is not only an improved information system that the company will earn; it will be a deep involvement of all the company’s actors to reach a common goal and to improve their collective results and intelligence, and finally their mutual collaboration.

Participation is the key;
Collaboration will be the natural consequence

(I published this article for the first time in January, 2007 within the eSangathan newsletter #2)