Fred Cavazza on its Enterprise 2.0 blog recently advertised Groupwise by Novell. While presenting it as a collaborative tools Fred makes a distinction that Novell overlooks: collaboration and participation. Confusing collaboration and participation is a marketing strategy. Most major enterprise software editors use it to take advantage of the buzz of Enterprise 2.0. They use it to compete in a market they missed in its infancy. Instead of designing specific products, they reskin and rebrand old stuff.

Let’s be clear “Enterprise 2.0″ is primarily about participation, not collaboration (and Groupwise is collaborative).

In fact, the confusion Novell and likes introduce is twofold:

1 - The one between collaboration and participation behind “2.0″

1.1 - Collaborative tools are made to have people work together on common tasks. It is about team work. They are principally organized around emails and documents, detailed profiling, structured workflows (document approval or task management). They might use RSS as notifier (like Groupwise) but these are systematic task notifications, often hooked with the mailing system.

1.2 - Participative tools are made to have people socialize their ideas and activity. It is about Flow and Networked Individualism (as Lee says). They are principally organized around blogs, social networks, social bookmarks, RSS notifiers, wikis and sometimes personalized pages. They do not manage documents as they play with webpages. They use RSS to favor social awareness, not task notifications. They are user or topic centric.

2 - The one between user profiling and end-user customization behind “personalization“

2.1 - User profiling is about giving access to the type of information that is line with the job description (scope and level).

2.2 - End-user customization is about enabling end-users to customize the look-and-feel and the list of features of their own session.

Both confusion are problematic for clients and customers. Not paying attention to these differences is the best way to favour non-adoption, which always result costly for the organization.

1 - The first one is problematic, because it perpetuates the old way of working. ECM reduces workflow to permission and conversation to versioning. Emails create confusion in conversations. Notifications are massive and often create cognitive burdening.

2 - The first one is also problematic, because it is not the same adoption strategy between a collaborative tool and a participative tool.

2.1 - The adoption of a collaborative tool focuses on deployment. It is mostly technical, the rest is the job of the boss who will enforce its use and agree training sessions.

2.2 - The adoption of a participative tool focuses on great user interfaces, quality people and quality content in the early days in order to create  exemplary behaviors and interactions that will influence new joiners. No matter Free Will, Humans are rational herds : they copy early-adopters behaviors and reproduce it or modify it only on the fringe. It is mostly sociological, no one can be bossy to make that work. That’s OD work.

3 - The second one is problematic, because it makes a wrong usage of personalization.

3.1 - User profiling is focusing on the role, not the person. This is just reproducing in the digital environment the hierarchy that exists in the real life organization. If you add the misunderstood “Knowledge is Power” motto that managers have in mind (because they missed the real sense of The Prince and The Art of the War, they read in B-Schools), this confines to social Malthusianism.

3.2 - End-user customization is all about empowering the user. S/He is a position to adjust the features and display in a way that makes sense to her/him in (professional) context. This is helpful for personal productivity. Nothing to deal with access, as one fundamental principle to participation is that a community is a community of peers (no matter their position in the hierarchy).