Collaborative network

A Collaborative Network, unlike an Enterprise social software is a work-centric network that focuses on managing projects and solving issues within the corporate environment. Originally defined by Oliver Marks who authors a Collaborative blog at ZDNet, it is less about (social networks) and more about getting work completed through teams.

A Collaborative Network integrates, (blogs), (Wiki's) forums and other social constructs, but weaves them to together with enterprise data so that they are interconnected and relevant to the corporation. In effect, an employee driven 360 degree information network that monitors and leverages enterprise data from Customer relationship management, Databases, Accounting Systems, Manufacturing resource planning and allows corporations to collaborate with the data.

Applications of Collaborative Networks

Elements

The seven essential elements of Collaborative Networks

• Search: Allowing users to search for experts, data or content
• Employee Driven: Approved users can add and share content in wiki fashion with low barriers to authorship
• Data Integration: Must allow enterprise data to be integrated into the system
• Dashboards and Monitoring: Measure success, adoption, projects through dashboards and monitoring tools
• User Follow: Ability to follow users and their content in the collaborative network
• Content Integration: Connects and links content dynamically
• Governance: Controlled access to content and data

Collaborative Networks consist of Intranet's, Extranet's and Knowledge Bases and are work networks designed to solving issues more efficiently and leveraging the wisdom of the crowds. It is a web based service, computing platform, and communications vehicle designed to merge enterprise data, microblogging, wikis, forums, and social networking to solve business objectives.

Use Cases

Microblogging, wikis, forums are stand alone solutions. They are mainly used to communicate 'one to one' or 'one to many' in an unstructured format. They are not dynamically connecting to give a 360 picture of the issues or project the enterprise is attempting to solve.

With Collaborative Networks, corporations can use data mashups to get a better picture of a business objective (a metric driven approach). Select team members to dynamically connect and collaborate around the data. Then solve business issues efficiently since all of the data, teams and content are in one location.

Challenges

As Collaborative Networks evolve and become increasingly popular with corporations and their extended networks, governance and security issues will need to be addressed. For example, what are the implication of Sarbanes Oxley and Collaborative Networks? Facebook has faced similar challenges with security among social connections.

See also

• Innovation - Knowledge engineering - Knowledge management - Semantic web
• General theory of collaboration - Collective intelligence - Polytely
• Global Information Grid
• Information Routing Group

External links

• "The Future of Collaborative Networks" by Aaron Fulkerson
• "How Collaborative Networks will Replace Social Networks" by Mark Fidelman
• "New Collaborative Networks more than Just a Wiki" Read Write Web