Social Networks and Manufacturing Collaboration
New technologies that are consumer friendly have always run into opposition from IT groups in large corporations. Initially, there was widespread resistance to allowing internet access (oddly enough, a lot of companies still restrict access), and each successive generation of new technology runs into the same barrier. Is it fear of the unknown? Grow up. Don’t trust your employees? Fire them and hire ones you do trust. As we’ve seen over and over again, all technology eventually makes it into the corporate realm, it’s just a matter of when and how gracefully.
Given this predisposition, it’s interesting to watch the social networks dance around the enterprise domain. The socialization of the enterprise does not mean introducing the consumer version of a social network into an enterprise framework, but rather taking the baseline concept of collaboration and anchoring it around a dynamic content paradigm with a specific objective in mind. Projects that are enterprise-wide in scope, such as a new product launch, cut across multiple divisions within a company. In theory engineering, marketing, sales, training, and customer support should be tightly coupled.
The current best in class performers can provide a tight integration for this type of production workflow, but in nearly every instance the application of the process is linear. This approach would be ideal if companies produced one product, one time. This, of course, does not happen; companies are constantly introducing new products and/or services, as well as expanding their existing offerings with feature enhancements, new services, etc. Because the nature of development and release of new products is inherently dynamic, the processes that drive and support this cycle need to be dynamic as well. Large groups of people are constantly collaborating to create better/faster/cheaper products, and more often than not they’re slowed down by the lack of a true collaboration solution that allows dynamic functional integration. That is where the collaborative aspect of social networks comes into play, and the catalyst for this is the associated integration of dynamic content management.
How do you socialize existing content resources within a corporation? A really great example is currently playing out with the British Library. The British Library recently extended it’s presence into Facebook, by taking a vast repository of information that had been “hermetically sealed” and making it available to a wide range of users, with information delivered in the context of a social exchange that can be on-going or event driven. This is a very cool, very forward-thinking approach to managing your content resources, and allows a new generation of users to breath life into a content repository that might have otherwise become marginalized. So what is the corporate corollary to this? Think about the vast content resources that are sitting in most corporations, all locked up in tight little silos. Imagine if all those content resources could be re-purposed dynamically in response to collaborative requirements that are inherent in any product development cycle. Allowing full access to content repositories in the context of a fully integrated collaborative workflow could bring the same re-energizing benefits to major manufacturing companies that the British Library is currently enjoying.