Like mentioned throughout my websites, I’m a true believer in mass-collaboration. And am regularly fascinated on how the general public devotes time to outstanding products like Joomla!, Typo3, The Apache Foundation, and alike… thus creating some of the world’s most valuable products on the market and ensuring that they remain free to create a better world.

The problem which corporations are facing is how to implement this breath of fresh and revitalizing air into their dusty ways of working to improve the value, not only to their companies in general.

The core question of the critics seems to be:“HOW do we achieve that without placing our intellectual property at stake?”

But that is the thinking of the weak. The real question is: How do we install it in the first place!

Realizing this tremendous value is the first thing that has to be achieved. Then we’ll go over and determine which product is the best for our organization. And the last phrase will have probably raised a lot eyebrows, right?

It’s not that hard, trust me. We start with the common palette of things. Everyone has heard of intranets before, right? That’s what we’re going to call the whole construct which we will be building upon. An intranet is nothing more than the closed internet of your corporation… ONLY! accessible to your staff with tough restrictions being applied so that no one from outside the organization can access what you’re working on! Either secured by not making it available to the outside world in the first place, giving hackers and other scum no chance in the first place, or through secure methods of authentication. (call me if you have further questions)

Ok – now let’s get to the value of the different instruments we can implement
Living in today’s world you will have most likely run across blogs, discussion forums etc. These can also be implemented in your organization to ease up internal communications. And best of all will make vertical communication a heck of a lot easier. Vertical communication is – by the way – the communication between “regular” employees and executive level. And since there are no real boundaries between these two “types” of people the executive level will not only be able to scrutinize what’s going on on his intranet but also actively participate in the current issues of the company. Be it that the menu in the kitchen sucks or important things. Get the point?

A blog in an organization is more valuable because people will be used to blogs and blogging. You won’t believe how many of your employees have a blog and generate damn good ideas on it! And you’re letting other companies utilize those ideas. Or worse, hire those people away from you.

And since your corporate blog will only be available on your intranet you won’t have to loose sleep over people from the outside world stealing your intellectual property.

Related posts:

1. Poor search functionality in Enterprise Content Management make the systems obsolete
2. Knowledge management – increasing the value of your business